4 ms·

There are plenty of excellent open source fonts with full glyph support and perfect kerning etc. But many are overused. If you use something like Raleway or oth

There are plenty of excellent open source fonts with full glyph support and perfect kerning etc. But many are overused. If you use something like Raleway or other popular fonts, visitors will have a subconscious sense of familiarity and associations which you may or may not like. If you want something distinctive it's hard to avoid commercial fonts.

tptacek 3y ago
Or you can just assume that distinctive letter shapes are not a problem you need to go out of your way to solve, and move on with your life, right? I think it's good to remember that there is a species of online person call "the font nerd" (I know because I am one and have font nerd friends), and font nerds would very much like it to be important to select interesting type combinations, and many are not above rationalizing urgencies for that hobby. But I doubt anybody in the real world actually cares. Look at the site we're on!
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  A wide variety of people in the real world -- designers, brand designers, accessibility designers, book publishers, teachers, avid readers -- absolutely care about this. I am often surprised by how much considered opinion non-professionals have about font choices, about readability etc. The site we're on: I don't think we are going to agree that this is the real world... ;-) (Ask anyone with dyslexia about typefaces and they can tell you a lot about what they like and don't like. Tell them about typefaces designed with dyslexia in mind and they may love you forever. I totally changed someone's life by introducing her to OpenDyslexic.)
  - tptacek 3y ago
    So: professional font nerds care. And there are pathologically bad choices to make that make pages unreadable to people with reading difficulties. I think my argument admits both of those amendments without really bending all that much.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      > So: professional font nerds care. I think I listed a broad enough constituency to rebut that claim. But I would agree that bad font choices (as well as bad colour contrasts) are a significant downside of all the flexibility.
      - tptacek 3y ago
        Just because this is fun: "designers, brand designers, accessibility designers, book publishers" are all professional font nerds. Teachers and "avid readers" might not be, but I dispute that either of those groups cares as much about font selection as font nerds wish they did.
  - thereisnojesus 3y ago
    You sound like an artist and not a professional designer.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      I don't know what this means. Are you saying professional designers don't care about this stuff? I'm a developer with front-end skills; I've spent a lot of time around professional designers for 27 years and I usually implement people's style guides. (I'm also a photographer, which should disqualify me from claiming to be an artist)
- ipaddr 3y ago
  The average person may not notice but they are being influenced. Fonts convey meaning and emotion like a picture.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    I disagree with your implication that this is really meaningful.
- saltcured 3y ago
  We could argue for purely functional, utilitarian priorities. But it seems a large fraction of humanity is very susceptible to form over function. Pretending that I think this is testable, I would wager that most people who "care" about fonts in the general population are driven by the same fashion mechanisms as in clothing and other product consumption. And I don't mean that they have to be aware they are bound like this... many are driven subconsciously by fashion concerns even when they construct other rationalization for their preferences. Humans are intensely social and can turn nearly any kind of visible behavior or marking into a social signal. A very small number might actually be concerned with actual usability/human factors of fonts, but most are in it for the tribal aspects of associating font usage with other "brand" or tribal identities. For the amateur producers, this can lead to cargo-cult emulation of the producers they admire. Even dissent here can fall into the same trap---consider how many times you've seen a LaTex document from a student who wants to be an author of a computer science paper, but doesn't really have anything to say (yet?)...
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Don't get me wrong. As I said, I'm a font nerd. My old blog has fonts I paid actual money for, which was otherwise exchangeable for goods and services in the real world. I like fonts. I get why people like fonts. I just don't think they matter. Now, if Computer Modern was an important professional signal, and it was the case that Monotype owned its copyright and rapaciously charged for its use, that would matter quite a bit. But that's not the case; ironically, the one font we can think of that has professional implications is under an open license. There is a battery of commonly-used fonts (the Microsoft fonts, we might as well call them) that are professionally important. But they're also universally available; they argue against the idea that font licensing is all that meaningful, as well.
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
> If you want something distinctive it's hard to avoid commercial fonts. I get what you mean -- Lobster is everywhere in the summer, and it is cute but now noticeably cheap. But again I tend towards thinking that this is an over-egged pudding, because truly distinctive commercial fonts are as likely to have negative associations, surely? Unless you're buying something that nobody else uses, and that has the same support issues as these blogs try to scare people with. If you want something truly distinctive, you can pay for someone to make a font suite for you, and you can consider your own needs. The BBC have for example been transitioning their sites for years over to their "Reith" font family, which has enhanced readability and rather fewer confusable pairs. ITV (the original and largest commercial TV channel in the UK) has their own typeface, "Reem", which is rather nice work (classier than most of their TV content). A pragmatic approach for many producers would be to pick a well-considered open-licensed sans or serif face and get a font designer to produce something distinctive (that need not be a truly complete face) to pair with it for captions, logotype, alternates etc.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
FireInsight 3y ago
Talk about overused, anyone else seeing Space Grotesk absolutely everywhere?
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Not in the UK... but maybe now I will see it everywhere!
- sbuk 3y ago
  That’s what it’s called! Horrible typeface. I hate the flat decenders on the “g” and the “y”.
fsckboy 3y ago
>There are plenty of excellent open source fonts with full glyph support and perfect kerning etc. that's not the problem, the problem is that there are 100x as many which are not excellent, have terrible kerning, etc. and sorting between them is really time consuming. Not to mention the category of "90% of the way there" knockoffs where you can't (because you're not an expert) tell till later that you're working with something really lame. If you're not a graphic designer, it's really difficult to navigate. (and don't read that as an endorsement of graphic designers, hire those and you've just added a lot of form bathwater, out from which the function baby will be thrown :)

tptacek 3y ago

Or you can just assume that distinctive letter shapes are not a problem you need to go out of your way to solve, and move on with your life, right? I think it's good to remember that there is a species of online person call "the font nerd" (I know because I am one and have font nerd friends), and font nerds would very much like it to be important to select interesting type combinations, and many are not above rationalizing urgencies for that hobby. But I doubt anybody in the real world actually cares. Look at the site we're on!

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
A wide variety of people in the real world -- designers, brand designers, accessibility designers, book publishers, teachers, avid readers -- absolutely care about this. I am often surprised by how much considered opinion non-professionals have about font choices, about readability etc. The site we're on: I don't think we are going to agree that this is the real world... ;-) (Ask anyone with dyslexia about typefaces and they can tell you a lot about what they like and don't like. Tell them about typefaces designed with dyslexia in mind and they may love you forever. I totally changed someone's life by introducing her to OpenDyslexic.)
- tptacek 3y ago
  So: professional font nerds care. And there are pathologically bad choices to make that make pages unreadable to people with reading difficulties. I think my argument admits both of those amendments without really bending all that much.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    > So: professional font nerds care. I think I listed a broad enough constituency to rebut that claim. But I would agree that bad font choices (as well as bad colour contrasts) are a significant downside of all the flexibility.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      Just because this is fun: "designers, brand designers, accessibility designers, book publishers" are all professional font nerds. Teachers and "avid readers" might not be, but I dispute that either of those groups cares as much about font selection as font nerds wish they did.
- thereisnojesus 3y ago
  You sound like an artist and not a professional designer.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    I don't know what this means. Are you saying professional designers don't care about this stuff? I'm a developer with front-end skills; I've spent a lot of time around professional designers for 27 years and I usually implement people's style guides. (I'm also a photographer, which should disqualify me from claiming to be an artist)
ipaddr 3y ago
The average person may not notice but they are being influenced. Fonts convey meaning and emotion like a picture.
- tptacek 3y ago
  I disagree with your implication that this is really meaningful.
saltcured 3y ago
We could argue for purely functional, utilitarian priorities. But it seems a large fraction of humanity is very susceptible to form over function. Pretending that I think this is testable, I would wager that most people who "care" about fonts in the general population are driven by the same fashion mechanisms as in clothing and other product consumption. And I don't mean that they have to be aware they are bound like this... many are driven subconsciously by fashion concerns even when they construct other rationalization for their preferences. Humans are intensely social and can turn nearly any kind of visible behavior or marking into a social signal. A very small number might actually be concerned with actual usability/human factors of fonts, but most are in it for the tribal aspects of associating font usage with other "brand" or tribal identities. For the amateur producers, this can lead to cargo-cult emulation of the producers they admire. Even dissent here can fall into the same trap---consider how many times you've seen a LaTex document from a student who wants to be an author of a computer science paper, but doesn't really have anything to say (yet?)...
- tptacek 3y ago
  Don't get me wrong. As I said, I'm a font nerd. My old blog has fonts I paid actual money for, which was otherwise exchangeable for goods and services in the real world. I like fonts. I get why people like fonts. I just don't think they matter. Now, if Computer Modern was an important professional signal, and it was the case that Monotype owned its copyright and rapaciously charged for its use, that would matter quite a bit. But that's not the case; ironically, the one font we can think of that has professional implications is under an open license. There is a battery of commonly-used fonts (the Microsoft fonts, we might as well call them) that are professionally important. But they're also universally available; they argue against the idea that font licensing is all that meaningful, as well.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago

> If you want something distinctive it's hard to avoid commercial fonts. I get what you mean -- Lobster is everywhere in the summer, and it is cute but now noticeably cheap. But again I tend towards thinking that this is an over-egged pudding, because truly distinctive commercial fonts are as likely to have negative associations, surely? Unless you're buying something that nobody else uses, and that has the same support issues as these blogs try to scare people with. If you want something truly distinctive, you can pay for someone to make a font suite for you, and you can consider your own needs. The BBC have for example been transitioning their sites for years over to their "Reith" font family, which has enhanced readability and rather fewer confusable pairs. ITV (the original and largest commercial TV channel in the UK) has their own typeface, "Reem", which is rather nice work (classier than most of their TV content). A pragmatic approach for many producers would be to pick a well-considered open-licensed sans or serif face and get a font designer to produce something distinctive (that need not be a truly complete face) to pair with it for captions, logotype, alternates etc.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

FireInsight 3y ago

Talk about overused, anyone else seeing Space Grotesk absolutely everywhere?

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Not in the UK... but maybe now I will see it everywhere!
sbuk 3y ago
That’s what it’s called! Horrible typeface. I hate the flat decenders on the “g” and the “y”.

fsckboy 3y ago

>There are plenty of excellent open source fonts with full glyph support and perfect kerning etc. that's not the problem, the problem is that there are 100x as many which are not excellent, have terrible kerning, etc. and sorting between them is really time consuming. Not to mention the category of "90% of the way there" knockoffs where you can't (because you're not an expert) tell till later that you're working with something really lame. If you're not a graphic designer, it's really difficult to navigate. (and don't read that as an endorsement of graphic designers, hire those and you've just added a lot of form bathwater, out from which the function baby will be thrown :)