I guess it's a good thing the web is built for users rather than designers, then, isn't it? Oh wait.
On a more serious note, screw all the font **ery. Settings → Language and Appearance → Advanced → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above. Better to have some crappy websites glitch out a bit than get a headache from trying to read 200 different fonts in a day.
I switched to using ublock origin to do that, since I can quickly add an exception for a site. Some sites use fonts for icons. Most of them are still usable but just look a bit silly, but sometimes it's annoying to the point that I want to add an exception.
Yep that's how I so that, although in step 4 I don't have to click "more", I immediately have an icon with a capital A that toggles fonts at the bottom. But maybe I configured it to automatically expand something that is by default hidden behind a more button... I honestly don't remember.
I do think that sites should strive to "just work" with nice system fonts (and respect user agent settings), but this is just an obtuse answer.
You can ship your own fonts. Everyone and their dog uses one of two web browser engines. People want their websites to "look right". You can offer a fully specified look!
And there is always someone on XP who complains your website looks like crap because their defaults look like crap while every other website bundled it’s own fonts and inputs.
everything that I use computers for has been ultimately to produce aesthetics to my exacting standards a example of which is the 8 years taken from first sketch of my redesign for the company logo to first example of use. But I refuse to allow applications like Figma on my company computing assets. You probably wouldn't be hired if you used such things as part of your work flow anyway. Good design begins with pencil and paper and writing down the words describing what you are trying to accomplish. Art has its own internal function and architectural laws of physics and materials sciences. Great art is like cathedrals (of very well thought out bazaars) the culmination of not only one or more crucial leaders of the design, but the ecosystem of cultural heritage and interpretation and conversation and argument that you are communicating with the viewer. When your typical Figma dogmatic sees their font rendering to their knee jerk repulsion that's really being affronted to have their South Park Authority challenged, all I am seeing is the subtleties and nuances of a critic composition potentially becoming unstable rather in the manner a engineer sees weakening structures and worries about how long and effectively can the edifice perform it's intended task.
I was told so recently. But it wasn't even for the font loading. It was to load the animated transition to transit from nothing to the entry page.
So to instead of dropping (or at least thinking about optimizing) the loading transition the designer (with a straight face) proposed a loading bar for the loading of the loading animation.
I’m sure there’s a few exception, but why do anyone care about which font is used as long as the basics such as fixed or sans serif is applied correctly?
The answer is most likely branding, but I don’t recall landing on a company website and going: “That’s not the font from their design guidelines. This is unacceptable, I shall take my business elsewhere”
All this tweaking and hacking font loading is a vaste of time.
I gather from your comment that you don’t do frontend. I don’t either. I also think it’s a waste of time. But I think you and I are not the intended audience. I think frontend people are trying to design an experience for users. The same way you or I might be designing an architecture for the system. They want it to look and feel a certain way in order to provoke a response.
Branding is bit subtler than that — you’re not going to really say anything about Target’s consistent styling, versus Walmart’s fairly austere aesthetic, but you definitely get a different “feel” from each, before looking at their actual contents/stock.
I don’t know whether fonts are really that important to the total equation, but “not terrible enough to walk out the door” is generally a very low bar to meet when designing a thing.
Another example in the app space — you know enterprise apps will get the job done, but they’re downright unpleasant to use; from aesthetics to workflow efficiency, they just barely hover over “dealing with it isn’t worth the output”. But that’s generally not where you want things to sit as a design goal.
> Another example in the app space — you know enterprise apps will get the job done, but they’re downright unpleasant to use; from aesthetics to workflow efficiency, they just barely hover over “dealing with it isn’t worth the output”.
While this is a good point, i don't feel like a discussion about fonts is relevant here. For example, when working with Jira, i don't care about what font it uses, as long as it is legible (e.g. even whatever is the default sans-serif font would work), whereas what actually matters to me in such a context is the responsiveness of the UI and how well it works, UX over UI.
If Jira's interface is laggy and slow, or just cumbersome to use because their implementation of custom fields is weird, no font or logo choices will make any of that markedly better. In my eyes, how something looks is largely decoupled from how well it works - if Jira were a GTK/Win32 app with almost no styling, but worked faster than it currently does, i'd probably get more value out of it than i currently do, fancy UI or not.
(just using Jira as an example here, because their UI redesign did make things slower and got some backlash from users that was ultimately ignored, i bet the same applies to a lot of other software out there, e.g. how Flutter apps oftentimes break right click behaviour in browsers etc.)
I’m not sure I understand the point about enterprise apps, because that can go both ways. Custom company application tend to be the worst, because they apply all the company branding guidelines, rather than just applying to system defaults.
I’m not making the case that one being better than the other, or really trying to say anything about custom vs enterprise.
My main point is simply that there’s a significant gap between “it can be used” and “it can be used well” — and a designer’s primary job is to bridge that gap (generally the engineer in us takes us to “it can be used”). That (some? many? majority?) designers aren’t competent is a separate concern… but their abstract goals are fairly obvious and intuitive if difficult to specify concretely
And we understand this intuitively, because there are many apps in our section of the universe that fall under it can be used — back-office apps, enterprise apps, etc a constant offender (not say good ones don’t exist, or bad custom apps don’t exist, or bad designers/designs don’t exist… etc — but we’ve all probably encountered a good few that are astoundingly unpleasant to use)
yup, users then even feel violated because some "great" manager somewhere told devs to screw over users settings and for example force user to look at animations, which is like 100 times worse than fonts mentioned earlier.
I still don’t see how picking a custom font over a default one contributed much to communication. Sure, the font need to be legable, clear destinction between letters all that stuff, but the system fonts is most likely better than a custom one for those things anyway.
Design and art communicate. In fact, that's all they do.
Fonts are associated with different periods of time, different groups of people, different artistic and even philosophical movements. Picking a font can help communicate how you see yourself and what you are trying to achieve. A picture paints a thousand words.
A world without typography would be a poorer world.
Then why not share all typography with everyone under a license, that allows every OS maker to include all the fonts they want plus allowing users to choose what else to install and then only use system fonts? That way we can have it all, fast websites, without additional secret server side tracking, and the fonts of the system being used and the artist getting their message communicated. No need for any web font.
We can definitely agree on that. I would want every designer to be able to express themselves as they wish to, without forcing their vision on everyone.
I just don't want to download megabytes of fonts when visiting a website, sending an additional request to some Google servers. It will always remain blocked on my end. I hope we can somehow get to a solution, that allows each side their choices, instead of prefering one dictating how things are regardless of the other side's wishes. That means, if I choose to have all websites display their text in some font meant for dyslexia, I should have the possibility to do so, without the whole design breaking. If I enjoy monospaced fonts perhaps (although that is a stretch) even that. Or if I just want my plain and simple system fonts, I should be able to do that and still make use of the website like every other visitor.
At least this much I expect from a proper design. CSS these days is so powerful, I would expect web designers to know their tools, including what can be done with CSS3, their choices and the consequences for visitors.
I am not even a frontend developer mainly. I do all kinds of things, sometimes also frontend, but I prefer not to. Yet I have apparently informed myself more about what is possible with CSS and the right approach to responsive design, than what I see implemented in many websites. I feel that some basic knowledge about what CSS can do should be a minimum requirement for anyone touching frontend stuff. It makes me question, whether there ever has been a web designer giving proper thought about some websites and a person, who has tested these things like "What happens, if the webfont is not loaded?". Maybe the website is some quick and dirty output of some tool, and the actual person developing the website had no good knowledge about web development and their tools. Ultimately what does a website consist of? Mostly HTML, CSS and perhaps if needed some JS. Some static resources like images, OK. If one does not know these well, how does one expect to deliver good work?
Perhaps it is also that people are not given enough time to really make a good design and implement that with proper CSS. Design and implementation of it takes time. It is the reason, why there is a job or role called web designer, UX designer. Someone actually gets down to it and does a good job, that earns my respect. But not this "Oh you used a slightly different font, the design of this website cannot work properly any longer!"-crap.
i have tried to ask people a simple question. "why do you think you know fonts better than microsoft or apple?" not to even talk about linux for a moment here. do these multi trillion dollar companies making operating systems do a shit job at fonts that each and every website developer needs to use google fonts that increase dependency on third parties than using system default fonts?
I don't know the technical details of font implementations. But I do know on my low ppi monitor, Ubuntu fonts look far better than both Windows and MacOS.
How productive do you think it would be to open a bug report with Microsoft telling them that Segoe UI/Arial/etc. are hideous? Do you think they will change them for me and/or license some good looking fonts to bundle with Windows?
Complaining and not using them is the only real option.
do you have a specific problems with fonts in say gnome or kde team? they would be more responsive for sure.
besides, i refuse to accept that the billions microsoft and apple in particular spent on truetype/cleartype fonts or whatever the tech is, is so poor that you are forced to use something else. i... i mean how can that be.... do you have some proof of this?
>Complaining and not using them is the only real option.
so microsoft and apple will be in your opinion forever content with shipping "shitty fonts" as "defaults" which run on billions of devices, android comes with fonts that run on many billion devices and they ALL are using shitty defaults and these multi trillion dollar companies do not know better than your average hacker news reader. nice. i am in good company lads.
Not particularly a fan of custom fonts, but fonts are not one size fits all. Apple or Microsoft default fonts are designed for the general use case, and other fonts might be more suited in a different context. Whether that's worth the cost, that's a different question.
come on. i am not expecting to visit an art gallery when i browse the current website or your local news portal or a blog or youtube. do you really think each and every website "needs" to individually tailor fonts to their "exact millimeter position" or otherwise the result will be utter garbage?
>and other fonts might be more suited in a different context
that is why "general use case" is my point. can you point me a specific example of where my current default "noto sans 10 pt" in kde neon is NOT suited for a specific use case? i want to see that unless i use a developer decided font, i would be totally off base, i would miss the plot, i would read garbage, etc etc.
Explaining them that web is not paper, helps removing a lot of this childish behaviour.