I love a good font (and try to use one on my own blog), but part of me gets really giddy when I discover a site with very little styling. It's like I've found some secret oasis that's going to have a high signal-to-noise ratio, or at least some more "raw" writing than you'd find on ${popularNewsWebsite}. Some sites that come to mind:
If you wander a bit through the Practical Typography site, you'll realize that its whole shtick is being minimal while not looking like it was made in '94. Even the ‘Introduction’ chapter says pretty much this.
The somewhat-recent slew of ‘This is a website’ pages don't come close to PT in terms of just being nice to look at.
They're plain black but internal links are indicated with small caps and external links with Butterick's odd red degree symbol°. It seems to me to sufficiently distinguish them.
It's enough to distinguish them once you've figured it out, but it's not clear that they're links just from looking at them. I had to hover over them to be sure.
Honestly, I hadn't noticed any of the links in the text. I was merely referring to the links on the front page.
Those red circle links are particularly tricky to spot. You have no idea how many of the words prior to the circle are part of the link, so your best option is to try and click the tiny circle.
I agree with you on the formatting of blogs. For my new philosophy blog[1] I went for hyper-minimal HTML and CSS, statically rendered with Jekyll, no JS at all. As part of that, I had to select a really nice font, since that's basically the only actual styling on the site, so I went for Literara[2], which I recently discovered and am totally enamored with. Besides Bookerly (I have a Kindle), Literata is the hands-down best font I've found for reading on screens.
I actually checked the about page for the first time when posting, and sure enough, you're correct. Google has good font design sense, I guess what with Roboto too. Cool!
That's true, but then I'd have to manually list posts, do forward and back buttons, and when I'm writing the articles do all kinds of boiler plate. Plus, markdown is much nicer than Html to write in.
On top of that, Jekyll doesn't add any weight for the client.
I don't know... I've been bitten three times by jekyll updates breaking my site in the worst moment. Thus I replaced it by a makefile that concatenates the appropriate html headers into the stuff I write. Couldn't be happier/more relaxed.
I have a friend that wants to use Makefiles as a build system for his website, C macros as the templating engine for the HTML, and a JS->C library so his WebAssembly C can access the DOM. Hence, he wants to write his web apps in C lol!
Sorry, the mentioning of Makefiles brought that back. In any case, you might be right, but it's a very simple website and Jekyll is easier. I'll cross the bridge of incompatibility when I come to it. Thanks for the heads up though!
> C macros as the templating engine for the HTML, and a JS->C library so his WebAssembly C can access the DOM. Hence, he wants to write his web apps in C lol!
Websites in C are alright, but this sounds like a crazy setup.
In my case, there is no C and the makefile does only "cat header.html $^ footer.html > $@"
Those (almost) all do reasonably well where most “minimalist” sites fail, accessibility. Many developers seem to get a kick out of “not caring about design”, as some sort of point of pride, but at the same time put in just enough CSS to screw over the visually-disabled.
HN, for instance, can’t be zoomed in iOS.
Also, the above macwright cuts off the titles to make room for the Dates, so to me the site looks like:
Using the font menu in the address bar to change the scaling should increase find size and reflow the text to fit in that size. Currently it just zooms in a. la. pinching. It works correctly on the home page, but not in a comments page.
Thanks for identifying that issue. I'll try to find a solution for folks who are using iOS + increased font sizes. It's going to be a little tricky, so if anyone has found a solution let me know - I haven't been able to find a way to reliably detect text size adjustments on iOS and the truncation behavior is desired at smaller font sizes. Definitely will try and find a way to make it work.
Okay, I couldn't find a way to change the layout when text size is controlled so I'll change it for all viewers if they're using a small device (under 640px wide, scaled). It works in my testing on an iPhone, but let me know if it works for you!
I’m not sure I understand the question. Are you asking what a designer should consider more important than compromising accessibility for minimalism? Pretty much anything...
> [...] part of me gets really giddy when I discover a site with very little styling.
You can set your preferred font families in your browser's settings that would be used exactly in case of "no page author font preference".
(You can even tweak default sizes, and even default colours, but setting wildly unusual default colours just reveals flaws in most author styles, so are not very practical, unfortunately.)
It is quite widely known fact (I think) but probably very rarely used feature; sorry for 'mansplaining' -- I bet you all know this and I would not be surprised if some of fellow HN readers even have non-default settings in there.
> I usually prefer Georgia [...]
What a coincidence, I read HN (and Wikipedia) in Georgia font, but not because of default browser settings, but because of site-specific user styles. I like my browser to be real "user agent".
I wonder if Times New Roman would look better on an extremely high resolution screen, or if there's something else that would have to change in how we produce screens. (Increased contrast, or the lack of a backlight, for example.)
Microsoft was aggressively hinting its fonts to align with screen pixels, so perhaps they might've done that with the licensed TNR too? Not sure if they did that to third-party fonts, especially before Verdana & co. And for some reason TNR on my Mac is credited to Microsoft & Monotype, which suggests that the same decisions are inherited (though Wikipedia says the Windows and Mac versions differ at least in ligatures, or differed at some point).
Edit: scratch this, forgot about the ‘HN Enhancement’ extension.
I see Helvetica Neue with fallback to Arial, and I checked that it's not my CSS.
Verdana is pretty crappy for texts of even a comment length, as it's wide as heck. I have to hack it out with CSS on sites that I use regularly, or the eye gets tired in minutes.
No need to improve readability if it's already fine. Verdana is appropriate at small sizes—in, say, image captions. At ‘normal’ sizes, it just m a k e s t h e e y e m o v e a l o t.
And I don't need to choose between the hyper-tight Helvetica and a bunch of MS fonts from the 90s, because thankfully the world is not limited to them.
To add to on-screen text - Calibri, Bahnschrift and Roboto have come out as my personal favorites. Of course some people prefer serif to non-serif and that's completely a subjective choice as well.
In my estimation, legibility is as much a function of familiarity as anything.
I think the degree to which serifs aid legibility is overstated. Any studies are likely biased through familiarity of serif fonts by test subjects, since that’s what most printed reading material used.
If you're upset by Butterick linking to his own font then you're not "all for artists promoting their work". This is ridiculous. Is he supposed to pretend he doesn't make fonts in his book about typography?
The site, and his complaints, came long before he had fonts to sell. And if you take the time and just read straight through it, you'll get a lot of knowledge and expert opinion (with which you may reasonably disagree), with no obligation or nagging to buy the fonts.
The site started years ago purely as an "educate yourself about fonts and stop using the fucking defaults!" site.
An ad coupled with some pretty shoddy arguments against a font that is extremely legible. I like typography as much as the next geek, but I have purposefully chosen Times New Roman many times in the past because it is so damn easy on the eyes.
Yeah, I just uploaded a PDF paper and did quite a lot of careful "typesetting" of the layout, font sizes and so on. I deliberately left the font as Times New Roman because I honestly think it's very readable, especially in print format.
"It connotes apathy" is a bit like accusing someone who eats enough vegetables of being "apathetic".
How are they the same width? It's pretty clear just from a quick look that every character in Equity is much wider than the corresponding one in Times New Roman.
He is honest about it. He wants the book's readers to buy his fonts. He says so. That doesn't mean the page is an ad; it means that the page has an ad on it, and he suggests several alternatives that he didn't design.
The italic and bold of Times New Roman are adapted from standard newspaper fonts of the era and have no relation to the Roman which has its roots in Plantin. The whole development of TNR was a bit of a boondoggle and the face was received coolly by The Times when it was finally available for their use.
A big part of the ubiquity of TNR is the fact that Monotype created a large number of extensions to the type family for specialized uses such as mathematics and non-Latin typesetting.
Has the default font on that site been changed? IIRC it was Valkyrie, but now Century Supra is selected for me, and it doesn't seem to elicit quite the same breath-taking effect. (Not talking about Times New Roman on the linked page.) If my memory and senses don't fault me in the tiredness and drunkenness, then switching to Valkyrie (at the bottom) is highly advised, as with it this site is the most beautiful on the whole web. Every single interval is perfect, which causes fits of irremediable envy for me.
However, Firefox Preview on my phone doesn't seem to answer my efforts towards the aesthetic bliss and refuses to load the font.
BTW, my personal favorite free serif font is Merriweather—particularly for reading long texts. It's somewhat overused on the web, but it's so much better than the next thing. It has the exact right ‘density’, and the shapes are playful just enough to not tire out the eye.
As for sans-serif, alas! If I could have Rosario with good kerning and support for more languages, or Optima with a bit less contrast and more humanistic shapes—I'd be so happy. Until then, it's back to Fira Sans again and again.
The best three fonts are: "sans-serif" (for general use), "monospace" (for code), and "serif" (for when you need a secondary font for contrast).
The choice of implementation for these fonts should be left to the reader (who will probably use the defaults for their browser/ebook reader). This way everybody gets the fonts they're used to, which are the easiest fonts to read. I don't even know which exact font I'm looking at now, but I know that I don't allow web designers to change it.
Most monitors are definitely still not high enough resolution to render serif fonts more clearly than sans serif ones. (By resolution, I mean the original meaning of pixel density per unit area, not the modern usage of total pixel count.)
Mobile screens are obviously higher resolution so it's less clear cut, but sans serif are still a bit clearer in my view. I think the problem here is that the text is much smaller in physical size, so now the resolution of the human eye has come into play.
When I first became interested in type, monitors typically had a resolution in the neighborhood of 72–96ppi. My MBP, according to Apple's support site, has a resolution of 226ppi. Back in the 80s I had speculated that 300ppi was a minimum for good typography, but maybe it's my aging eyesight, but I find that what I've got on my laptop is more than sufficient to use most typefaces (and the fact that there's no pixel spread likely helps with the slight lack of resolution), although more subtle designs, like Optima really want a resolution of at least 1200ppi.
Resolution goes back even farther than that, to the number of line pairs that could be "resolved" (distinguished from one other) in an image. It was a way to compare the ability of imaging systems to capture and accurately display fine detail.
With digital sensors and screens you can pretty much just calculate it directly since you can't resolve detail below the pixel level. But, note that moire can eliminate fine detail well above pixel level if not controlled.
Before that, there were standard targets with fine lines in tight tapering patterns. Folks would take a picture of the target with a particular lens and film, and then count the smallest line pairs they could make out before the taper disappeared into an undifferentiated blur. By varying lenses and films, they could compare resolution. Example:
I don't think there's anything inherently more legible about either serif or sans-serif fonts. Whichever one you read the most will be most legible to you, which means the default shouldn't be changed even when it's no longer technically necessary.
Common wisdom is that serif fonts are easier to read, but most research I've read on the topic show either very small or no readability increase with serif over san-serif fonts.
I don't think it's obvious either way. Reading on paper vs. high-DPI screens isn't that different.
Text-oriented software like Kindle and Medium default to serif fonts, but I don't know if they have any research to back that up. I suppose Amazon's usability people might have even bothered to look into that.
Of course a large part of this is simply that you read fastest what you read the most.
Pretty much anything that isn't body text. Headings. Words on posters. Book covers and spines. Advertisements (unless they're very wordy ones). Street signs.
Of course these don't all want the same sort of treatment, but they have some features in common: you're not going to be reading a lot of whatever-it-is at one go, and there probably aren't going to be multiple lines of text. So you don't care so much about things like how comfortable it is to read in bulk or whether blocks of text look good in overall shape/density, and being quirky or distractingly eye-catching might be a feature rather than a bug.
Ah but fonts are so important to the 'look and feel' of any publication that has text (and possibly even to those that don't!).
They are also important to the built environment - in Lisbon, Portugal where I now live, all the signage I see out and about is sans-serif, possibly the same font, and quite likely by the same handful of design agencies. I am genuinely feeling oppressed by sans-serif!! I long for serif, or indeed anything to indicate individuality and self expression (the graffiti is sometimes really good though).
I would be interested in reading more about how you prevent web designers from changing the page's font. I used about:config on Firefox to stop fonts from downloading, but that made it hard for me to use github.com and one or 2 other sites because those sites use a font to render icons that are essential parts of the UI.
In Firefox: Options – Language and Appearance – Fonts and Colors – Advanced… – Disable “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above”
It's what I've been using for months now (and I also block web fonts using Firefox Focus' extension in iOS/iPadOS Safari). And that's even though I'm a typography geek, and have bought fonts from Matthew Butterick (the author of the submitted article).
Looks weird for a day or two, after that you never miss web fonts.
Make sure to select a nice default font (for example, Verdana is nice, but I'm German, and Verdana does not have a closing quotation mark for German – it's another one than is in use in English).
My setting is Constantia as default font and serif, Segoe UI as sans-serif, and Consolas as monospace.
I think there's a chance that if a document is set in Times New Roman, the author focussed on the content rather than the presentation, which usually is a good thing.
It's not an either/or proposition; and given the low cost of changing the base font for a document, all using the defaults says is "I don't care about presentation at all".
Thanks for the suggestions! I checked them all out. Lyon, Ivar and Arnhem are quite nice substitutes for Times.
The others I find a bit too "designed" to be used as straight substitutes. Their design is quite striking, and risks distracting from the message in long paragraph text. Particularly Gliko, which is beautiful for titling but I can't imagine reading more than a few sentences of it.
I'm personally quite partial to the Adobe fonts for book text:
My opinion: Calibri is an excellent font, created by one of the leading contemporary typographers, but like every default font, it is a non-choice, too boring for professional applications where style is a concern, thanks to its ubiquity.
Roboto is (or: has become, its beginnings were somewhat rough) a great screen font, but for printed applications, it tends to look a little dull. This has to do with ubiquity, but also with the simplicity that is inherent to most screen fonts.
I don't mind Calibri, but I've always thought it was a surprising choice as a default since whenever MS Word switched to it. It just looks too "friendly" for "serious business" to me. I think if you interpolated between Helvetica and Comic Sans you'd get something like Calibri on the way. (PS I know nothing about typography.)
Comic Sans is too successful. It has such a perfect air of informality that it gets chosen by everyone who wants to avoid a stuffy formality. To me it goes too far though, like a clown suit.
I suggest that on any occasion when you're inclined to use Palatino for substantial quantities of text (as opposed to titles, posters, book covers, etc.) you would do better to use Aldus instead.
(Aldus is a companion face to Palatino; Zapf's intention was that Palatino is for "display" use -- titles, posters, etc. -- and Aldus is for body-text.)
It doesn't appear to be. Microsoft provides an open-source alternative called Selawik which I suppose could in theory be added to Google Fonts and thus become available in Google Docs, but that hasn't happened.
I finished Practical Typography yesterday and highly recommend it! In fact, I recommend anything Matthew Butterick I’ve seen so far. Triplicate is a perfect programming font, Pollen, Beautiful Racket, Reversing the Tide of Declining Expectations [1], his newsletter...
The DejaVu Serif fonts bundled with Ubuntu are a really nice alternative to Times New Roman (and much nicer licensing!)
I have a hard time quantifying why, but they’re much easier on the eyes.
Not a shameless plug I swear but we converted DejaVu Serif to a web font and used it here, if you want to see it “in action:” https://www.obsessivefacts.com/memespeech
Unfortunately, development of the DejaVu fonts stalled years ago. There are still some typographic infelicities that could be ironed out, and its Unicode coverage basically stopped at where Unicode was in the early millennium.
One of the reasons that DejaVu’s development stalled is because Google launched the Noto Fonts project, which is free/libre (SIL Open Font License) and quickly outdid DejaVu in Unicode coverage.
I can see Times New Roman being the choice of no choice - when you don't think about it, you get that.
Reading this inspired me to think that I should search for an article like, "best fonts for people who don't know anything except Google Fonts" (I searched Google, wasn't very illuminating).
I don't know much more than Comic Sans bad, Helvetica good, Times New Roman meh. But, I'm learning.
Besides the practicaltypography website, reading Thinking with Type from Ellen Lupton was in my case a short, easy, and educative introduction to typography.
I used to share that thought, and I have a font that hangs around called Modded Palatinx that contains a few improvements from the days when it was more important to me that my system be right, than that it be compatible. But nowadays, it looks a bit weak compared to other serifs - more of an acknowledgement of serifs without their meat. It's possible that hi res screens has made me think differently. I'm not sure.
(But in any case, the standard Computer Modern Roman is not my cup of tea. I like more rounded fonts, but its serifs are too strong and dominate the shape.)
To me this conversation is more about popular opinions in general and how many of them persist as a result of ubiquity over any sort of merit
Times Roman is just another example of the defaults becoming the standard and we've all been trained to know the defaults serve hardly anyone yet we keep hammering away at them relentlessly as if they'll give us anything but default outcomes
I love every article that comes up on HN/reddit about typography and fonts because the inevitable onslaught of "I find X unreadable and Y delightful because of Z" gives me new fonts to try.
There is some objectiveness to this subject but damned little and 99% of the comments are opinion. As a developer of many years, I've learned to just skip over any post that uses any form of the 'readability' adjective. It's totally subjective, and the poster more often than not will have a religious fervor about their opinion.
For a lot of us fonts were a key selling point of early computing and there's a story about Steve Jobs taking in design courses in fonts as an inspiration for the design of the Mac operating system.
The whole concept of fonts on the machine is another example of the message in the new medium essentially encapsulating the old.
Fonts are an important tradition going back to the printing press and we are rightfully protective of them.
I stumbled upon this article on readability recently [1]. It mentioned an interesting "rule" about what the optimal typeface width is for readability.
Apparently the "rule" is that the lowercase alphabet should take up about 13 em of space.
From this image [2], you can see that Nimbus Roman No9 (which is a Times New Roman clone) is a little bit narrower than that.
It would be interesting to see what the lowercase alphabet width is of the fonts proposed in the OP. Especially since the author noted that one of the criticisms of Times New Roman is that it's "too narrow".
In addition to appearance, there are of course potentially other constraining factors in font choice, depending on your use case.
For instance, I need a good 'editor' font which is both monospace and supports combining diacritics well, for writing papers in LaTeX in Emacs.
And I need good 'display' fonts for the PDF output of those LaTeX documents, which also of course have to support a wide range of combining diacritics well.
For both use cases, there is a surprisingly small range of choices given the full set of constraints.
I found a really good new font recently which I'm going to be using in place of Baskerville and Times New Roman, my two go-to serif fonts. It's called Literata[1], and it (to me at least) conveys this really nice professional, formal look, which approximates what I feel when I open a printed book, but on the screen. There's something to it that's hard to describe that I really like (also the italics is very good imo).
First, as a type nerd, I don't agree that Times is a bad font or that it signals "apathy." When I see nice kerning, judicious leading and tracking in a book design or webpage using a Times font - particularly LaTeX documents using TeX Gyre Termes - I'm generally very pleased.
Second, Plantin is not a "Times alternative," it is a variation on Bembo. Bembo is the opposite of Times ... it is e x p a n s i v e. It's like suggesting black as an alternative to white.
Third, I think the best alternative is actually NYT Imperial.
I stand corrected. Let me rather say that Plantin shares a lot more with (say) Bembo than it does with Times, and I don't see why either would be a times "alternative".
I'm also a type nerd and I can't stand Times New Roman. Or Arial, for that matter.
It screams apathy to me because it has been the "default" for a long time and if among the thousands of excellent fonts out there you pick the default, it feels very much apathetic. It makes a piece of work look like a high school essay.
Plantin is in no way a variation of Bembo. It's based on the designs of Robert Granjon and is the stated starting point for the roman (but not italic or bold) of TNR. Bembo, on the other hand is based on the designs of Aldus Manutius and has a distinctly different character (so to speak).
>When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the font of least resistance.” Times New Roman is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color.
The author never considers the fact that a writer may simply like the way Times New Roman looks. There's nothing wrong with liking things that are popular or the default choice.
I grew up with Times New Roman as the default font in MS Word. It's not the default any longer but I tend to switch to it precisely because it is the font that symbolizes least resistance. "To look at Times New Roman is to gaze into the void" is often exactly the statement I want to make with my presentation, similar to how I can romanticize the typewriter and not having a choice with font and layout.
I don't disagree with this from a design point of view (I'm not a designer), but I can't stand the modern web thing of "I'm using a fancy custom font, so you'll see website load and then flash over to the correct font after a second or two". In an attempt to use a slick font we've made things look really janky. But I guess it's not the designer's FOUT...
I prefer sans serif on a typical resolution PC monitor. I might prefer serif on a high-DPI but only my phone qualifies, and I don't do much reading on that.
For electronic reading, it's no contest for sans-serif for me. Really the only time I find serif easier is with low font size (like equivalent to 8px on my monitor) physical books. And it can only help so much, some newspapers here go lower, and while not unreadable, I wouldn't describe their text as clear.
Reports we did in high school were supposed to be submitted in Times, but I hated it for the same reason of it just being the default. I always used Garamond instead. I don't expect many of the teachers knew or cared about the difference, but it made me feel a whole lot better. I was such a rebel...
I too hate TNR, but mostly just because I think it's ugly and too small. Georgia makes a surprising alternative for Windows users - it's the same style but the details are much better thought out.
My favorite is "Linux Libertine O". My desktop browser is set to use it for serif, sans serif, and all page-specified fonts except mono (which is Inconsolata).
Firefox on Android refuses to use the fonts I have designated in about:config, so HN remains depressingly sans.
So funny, I was just helping my 20 year old with a page layout in which she had used TNR. I said, "We need to select ANYTHING but Times New Roman." Article forwarded. ;)
- https://danluu.com/
- https://100r.co/site/home.html
- https://meagher.co/
- https://macwright.org/
Where Times really shines is printed material. I find it (and Garamond) extremely easy to read.
For longform screen reading, I usually prefer Georgia, Freight Text, Source Serif, and Tiempos. San Francisco is a nice sans-serif font for this, too.
The somewhat-recent slew of ‘This is a website’ pages don't come close to PT in terms of just being nice to look at.
Links were just plain black with no decoration, making me have to guess at every click what was navigation.
Conventions are useful.
Those red circle links are particularly tricky to spot. You have no idea how many of the words prior to the circle are part of the link, so your best option is to try and click the tiny circle.
[1]: http://philosophica.christopherdumas.org [2]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Literata?query=liter
On top of that, Jekyll doesn't add any weight for the client.
Sorry, the mentioning of Makefiles brought that back. In any case, you might be right, but it's a very simple website and Jekyll is easier. I'll cross the bridge of incompatibility when I come to it. Thanks for the heads up though!
Websites in C are alright, but this sounds like a crazy setup.
In my case, there is no C and the makefile does only "cat header.html $^ footer.html > $@"
HN, for instance, can’t be zoomed in iOS.
Also, the above macwright cuts off the titles to make room for the Dates, so to me the site looks like:
Rec...2020-06-01
Sec...2020-05-10
Link...2020-05-02
Rec...2020-05-01
Both pinch-to-zoom and increasing font size work for me in iOS Safari, what zoom are you talking about?
https://5ed7d94981b55b0008f07a3b--macwright.netlify.app/
You can set your preferred font families in your browser's settings that would be used exactly in case of "no page author font preference". (You can even tweak default sizes, and even default colours, but setting wildly unusual default colours just reveals flaws in most author styles, so are not very practical, unfortunately.)
It is quite widely known fact (I think) but probably very rarely used feature; sorry for 'mansplaining' -- I bet you all know this and I would not be surprised if some of fellow HN readers even have non-default settings in there.
> I usually prefer Georgia [...]
What a coincidence, I read HN (and Wikipedia) in Georgia font, but not because of default browser settings, but because of site-specific user styles. I like my browser to be real "user agent".
I see Helvetica Neue with fallback to Arial, and I checked that it's not my CSS.
Verdana is pretty crappy for texts of even a comment length, as it's wide as heck. I have to hack it out with CSS on sites that I use regularly, or the eye gets tired in minutes.
As a more readable version of Times New Roman, I like Georgia. It too was commissioned by Microsoft as a web font.
And I don't need to choose between the hyper-tight Helvetica and a bunch of MS fonts from the 90s, because thankfully the world is not limited to them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css
https://lucumr.pocoo.org
https://http2.info
https://dwell.com (not text only but good use of imagery in a non distracting way.)
I think the degree to which serifs aid legibility is overstated. Any studies are likely biased through familiarity of serif fonts by test subjects, since that’s what most printed reading material used.
> It was created for a newspaper, so it’s a bit narrower than most text fonts
yet all the alternatives are almost exactly the same width. Plantin is even a bit narrower. How do they "avoid its shortcomings"?
The second flaw is "italic is mediocre", which I'm not in a position to judge.
The third (and main) complaint is "it connotes apathy", and one of the suggested alternatives is:
> EQUITY (designed by me).
I'm all for artists promoting their work, as long as they're honest about it. This page is basically an ad, right?
The site started years ago purely as an "educate yourself about fonts and stop using the fucking defaults!" site.
"It connotes apathy" is a bit like accusing someone who eats enough vegetables of being "apathetic".
https://practicaltypography.com/how-to-pay-for-this-book.htm...
A big part of the ubiquity of TNR is the fact that Monotype created a large number of extensions to the type family for specialized uses such as mathematics and non-Latin typesetting.
However, Firefox Preview on my phone doesn't seem to answer my efforts towards the aesthetic bliss and refuses to load the font.
BTW, my personal favorite free serif font is Merriweather—particularly for reading long texts. It's somewhat overused on the web, but it's so much better than the next thing. It has the exact right ‘density’, and the shapes are playful just enough to not tire out the eye.
As for sans-serif, alas! If I could have Rosario with good kerning and support for more languages, or Optima with a bit less contrast and more humanistic shapes—I'd be so happy. Until then, it's back to Fira Sans again and again.
The choice of implementation for these fonts should be left to the reader (who will probably use the defaults for their browser/ebook reader). This way everybody gets the fonts they're used to, which are the easiest fonts to read. I don't even know which exact font I'm looking at now, but I know that I don't allow web designers to change it.
There’s a reason books and magazines are set in serif fonts: they are easier to read for long text paragraphs.
GUIs defaulted to sans serif fonts because displays didn’t have enough resolution to properly render serifs, but that’s mostly not the case anymore.
Mobile screens are obviously higher resolution so it's less clear cut, but sans serif are still a bit clearer in my view. I think the problem here is that the text is much smaller in physical size, so now the resolution of the human eye has come into play.
Interesting - I wasn't aware "resolution" was ever used this way. PPI (pixels per inch) and "pixel density" are common terms for this now.
With digital sensors and screens you can pretty much just calculate it directly since you can't resolve detail below the pixel level. But, note that moire can eliminate fine detail well above pixel level if not controlled.
Before that, there were standard targets with fine lines in tight tapering patterns. Folks would take a picture of the target with a particular lens and film, and then count the smallest line pairs they could make out before the taper disappeared into an undifferentiated blur. By varying lenses and films, they could compare resolution. Example:
https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2014/12/36-megapixels-vs-6x7-v...
As an example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4612630/
Text-oriented software like Kindle and Medium default to serif fonts, but I don't know if they have any research to back that up. I suppose Amazon's usability people might have even bothered to look into that.
Of course a large part of this is simply that you read fastest what you read the most.
Of course these don't all want the same sort of treatment, but they have some features in common: you're not going to be reading a lot of whatever-it-is at one go, and there probably aren't going to be multiple lines of text. So you don't care so much about things like how comfortable it is to read in bulk or whether blocks of text look good in overall shape/density, and being quirky or distractingly eye-catching might be a feature rather than a bug.
Example/demo: https://input.fontbureau.com/preview/?size=14&language=xml&t...
They are also important to the built environment - in Lisbon, Portugal where I now live, all the signage I see out and about is sans-serif, possibly the same font, and quite likely by the same handful of design agencies. I am genuinely feeling oppressed by sans-serif!! I long for serif, or indeed anything to indicate individuality and self expression (the graffiti is sometimes really good though).
I fully understand you, so just a few examples of the opposite of what you describe:
https://www.alamy.com/old-and-new-street-signs-with-blacklet...
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-paris-july-14-art-nouveau-...
It's what I've been using for months now (and I also block web fonts using Firefox Focus' extension in iOS/iPadOS Safari). And that's even though I'm a typography geek, and have bought fonts from Matthew Butterick (the author of the submitted article).
Looks weird for a day or two, after that you never miss web fonts.
Make sure to select a nice default font (for example, Verdana is nice, but I'm German, and Verdana does not have a closing quotation mark for German – it's another one than is in use in English).
My setting is Constantia as default font and serif, Segoe UI as sans-serif, and Consolas as monospace.
Lyon Text: https://commercialtype.com/catalog/lyon_text
Blanco: https://www.fostertype.com/retail-type/blanco
Bridge Text: https://www.typemates.com/fonts/bridge-text
Arnhem: https://www.typeby.com/fonts/arnhem
Heldane: https://klim.co.nz/retail-fonts/heldane-text/
Ivar Text: https://lettersfromsweden.se/font/ivar-text/
Gliko Modern: http://r-typography.com/19_gliko-modern/
Rialto Piccolo: https://fontstand.com/fonts/rialto-piccolo-df
The others I find a bit too "designed" to be used as straight substitutes. Their design is quite striking, and risks distracting from the message in long paragraph text. Particularly Gliko, which is beautiful for titling but I can't imagine reading more than a few sentences of it.
I'm personally quite partial to the Adobe fonts for book text:
* Adobe Garamond https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/adobe-garamond#fonts-section
* Adobe Caslon https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/adobe-caslon#fonts-section
* And to some degree, even Minion https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/minion
Quick followup to share: https://typefoundry.directory
Readable and aesthetically pleasing, what's the general opinion on these default fonts in the typography world?
Roboto is (or: has become, its beginnings were somewhat rough) a great screen font, but for printed applications, it tends to look a little dull. This has to do with ubiquity, but also with the simplicity that is inherent to most screen fonts.
For a sans serif, default font, I like Palatino. Classic, nice open counters.
I suggest that on any occasion when you're inclined to use Palatino for substantial quantities of text (as opposed to titles, posters, book covers, etc.) you would do better to use Aldus instead.
(Aldus is a companion face to Palatino; Zapf's intention was that Palatino is for "display" use -- titles, posters, etc. -- and Aldus is for body-text.)
https://imgur.com/a/mpJtv8o
https://imgur.com/a/RxN88xs
[1] https://unitscale.com/mb/reversing-the-tide/
https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com
Look how many posts here use emotionally charged words like "unreadable", "love", "hate", "loathe", "abomination", etc.
I have a hard time quantifying why, but they’re much easier on the eyes.
Not a shameless plug I swear but we converted DejaVu Serif to a web font and used it here, if you want to see it “in action:” https://www.obsessivefacts.com/memespeech
Linux Libertine O is a better font in every way. If you really feel like you need a sans, Biolinum is pleasing.
I can see Times New Roman being the choice of no choice - when you don't think about it, you get that.
Reading this inspired me to think that I should search for an article like, "best fonts for people who don't know anything except Google Fonts" (I searched Google, wasn't very illuminating).
I don't know much more than Comic Sans bad, Helvetica good, Times New Roman meh. But, I'm learning.
Luckily I can usually arrange for that.
(But in any case, the standard Computer Modern Roman is not my cup of tea. I like more rounded fonts, but its serifs are too strong and dominate the shape.)
Times Roman is just another example of the defaults becoming the standard and we've all been trained to know the defaults serve hardly anyone yet we keep hammering away at them relentlessly as if they'll give us anything but default outcomes
There is some objectiveness to this subject but damned little and 99% of the comments are opinion. As a developer of many years, I've learned to just skip over any post that uses any form of the 'readability' adjective. It's totally subjective, and the poster more often than not will have a religious fervor about their opinion.
For a lot of us fonts were a key selling point of early computing and there's a story about Steve Jobs taking in design courses in fonts as an inspiration for the design of the Mac operating system.
The whole concept of fonts on the machine is another example of the message in the new medium essentially encapsulating the old.
Fonts are an important tradition going back to the printing press and we are rightfully protective of them.
Apparently the "rule" is that the lowercase alphabet should take up about 13 em of space.
From this image [2], you can see that Nimbus Roman No9 (which is a Times New Roman clone) is a little bit narrower than that. It would be interesting to see what the lowercase alphabet width is of the fonts proposed in the OP. Especially since the author noted that one of the criticisms of Times New Roman is that it's "too narrow".
[1] https://hstuart.dk/2008/02/13/readability/
[2] https://hstuart.dk/img/2008-02-13-widths.png
For instance, I need a good 'editor' font which is both monospace and supports combining diacritics well, for writing papers in LaTeX in Emacs.
And I need good 'display' fonts for the PDF output of those LaTeX documents, which also of course have to support a wide range of combining diacritics well.
For both use cases, there is a surprisingly small range of choices given the full set of constraints.
[Details here: https://babbagefiles.xyz/beautiful-and-free-typefaces/ ]
[1]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Literata?query=liter
Second, Plantin is not a "Times alternative," it is a variation on Bembo. Bembo is the opposite of Times ... it is e x p a n s i v e. It's like suggesting black as an alternative to white.
Third, I think the best alternative is actually NYT Imperial.
Plantin was released about 15 years before Bembo.
It screams apathy to me because it has been the "default" for a long time and if among the thousands of excellent fonts out there you pick the default, it feels very much apathetic. It makes a piece of work look like a high school essay.
The author never considers the fact that a writer may simply like the way Times New Roman looks. There's nothing wrong with liking things that are popular or the default choice.
Firefox on Android refuses to use the fonts I have designated in about:config, so HN remains depressingly sans.
Holy frig, Monotype vs. Linotype flamewar anyone?