[esonderegger]

Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one line on a Mac (Helvetica)?

Until we can get the major operating systems to include some of the most popular open-source fonts, we're stuck with web fonts.

If macOS, Windows, Debian, iOS, and Android all came with Roboto, Source Sans, Lato, Merriweather, Raleway, etc. pre-installed, then we could make the case that if we used those fonts instead of non-free ones we would have consistency across all platforms and better performance for our users.

Since I doubt that day will ever come, we instead need to weigh an inconsistent appearance against a poor experience for those on slow connections. Different organizations will choose to prioritize different things, and that's ok.

A significant portion of marketers and designers will always demand pixel perfection for their websites. I'm just glad we're not putting text inside of images any more.

[erikpukinskis]

This is because a vanishingly small percentage of designers have truly, in their heart, accepted the web as a medium.

They'll sit lovingly with a bunch of dinged up old lead typesetting tools, positively jizz over imperfections in ink distribution, but try to talk to them about system fonts, box models, or free phones and their eyes glaze over and they drift off into their color calibrated RAW dreamland.

In schools they teach people to embrace media but that only applies to fetishized antique media.

They'll use half of the GPU to render CRT glow too, with 8-bit graphics, gush about material metaphors in their visual design, but they won't consider the material properties of the actual distribution medium for their work.

We still haven't seen a true modernist design movement in the digital age. Maybe very briefly for a year or two in the nineties when browsers were good enough to be interesting but not good enough to do anyrhing. It'll come eventually, but it's taking its sweet time.

[TheOtherHobbes]

This is a completely unrealistic view of how designers work.

I've yet to meet a web designer who would have the first clue what to do with hot metal. There are some old guys who remember physical typesetting for print, but design has been primarily electronic for around twenty years now.

The history of the web started after most print had already moved to digital fonts and layout with Pagemaker, then Quark Xpress.

It's one of the tragedies of browser development that it took the web 15 years to start to catch up with industry standard page layout possibilities, and another 5 years to start dealing with fonts intelligently.

And the web - frankly - still sucks for this kind of work. It's not that responsive design is harder than print, it's more that from a designer's POV CSS has been a train wreck for most of its history.

I understand some people here want their own font stylings, and that's fine. But designers use fonts for a reason, and "Not invented here because I don't like this" isn't a good enough reason to make it impossible for them to do that.

[erikpukinskis]

That's exactly my point. You are unwilling to accept the properties of your medium. You just say "it sucks" and fight with it. You're like an acrylic painter who complains that oil dries slowly and keeps designing for acrylics, and everything comes out smudgy.

[mbrock]

Web fonts are a part of the web, so it kind of sounds like you're the one refusing to accept the properties of the medium.

[cbr]

Web fonts are a poorly performing part of the web.

[et-al]

> This is because a vanishingly small percentage of designers have truly, in their heart, accepted the web as a medium.

That seems a bit harsh. If anything, I feel like the old static print mindset is on its way out and designers have been leaning towards the web as a medium with dynamic layouts. Speakers[0] at An Event Apart spoke of the web as a fluid continuum, so even the idea of designing for only mobile and desktop is insufficient these days (especially with all the varying device sizes).

If you're working with any designer that still expects pixel perfection, I'd suggest that they attend An Event Apart conference, or at least read a few articles on A List Apart.

[0] http://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design

[yellowapple]

"I feel like the old static print mindset is on its way out and designers have been leaning towards the web as a medium with dynamic layouts."

I want to believe you, but I feel like the sheer number of designers who whine about GIMP's lack of CMYK support in their justifications for using Photoshop instead (nevermind that pretty much all modern display technology is RGB-centric) suggests otherwise.

I can understand thinking in a CMYK mindset and not wanting to have to think about RGB, but that nonetheless suggests an unwillingness to change one's mindset to adapt to current media.

[TeMPOraL]

Still doesn't solve the bigger problem - that neither designers nor publishers actually embraced the digital medium. They've been treating the web as if it was a poster - something for the designers to show off on. The only thing the current "responsive design" fad brought up is that the poster now changes its layout with size in a somewhat intelligent manner. But they're still drawing posters. We're still getting only text + pictures + occasional video. What about interactive descriptions? Embedded simulations? Models that we can explore, or play with? Nowhere to be found, except in occasional essay by Bret Victor.

[et-al]

That's because up until recently, the only tools users have to interact have been 2D. If 3D becomes a thing, more designers will embrace it and think of new ways to communicate ideas in that space.

Also, in a discussion about communicating efficiently over limited bandwidth, and the possibility removing web fonts, 3D spaces is in a completely opposite direction. We'd have to load vector files and texture maps so that the 3D space doesn't look like crap.

Also, there's a limit to how much input a human can process. There's a reason why certain sites have gotten more simple to restrict distractions.

[thrillgore]

>We still haven't seen a true modernist design movement in the digital age.

But we have -- unified design guidelines like Metro and Material Design ARE modernist design movements for the era of displays and interactive media. Just because it only applies for an Operating System or an Application doesn't make it any different than using cut-out colors or Gotham in your print ad.

[Gruselbauer]

Any recommendations as for investigating your last point? What would constitute a truly modernist design in your view? Good food for thought, thanks.

[jimktrains2]

> Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one line on a Mac (Helvetica)? > Until we can get the major operating systems to include some of the most popular open-source fonts, we're stuck with web fonts.

This really seems to be a problem with marketing and design people; we're not stuck with webfonts. We're stuck with unreasonable people.

[hyperpape]

Many people in our profession write code that's less that 80 characters per line because that's how much you could display on terminals in the 70s.

As a profession, we can't complain that someone might be bothered by the idea of word-wrapping.

[zeveb]

> Many people in our profession write code that's less that 80 characters per line because that's how much you could display on terminals in the 70s.

It's _also_ a very reasonable & readable amount of text in a row. There's nothing wrong with that.

[jimktrains2]

Not only is 80char more readable, as a sibling comment said, but it also allows addition pieces of code to be displayed side-by-side on a laptop screen.

To be fair, 120char wide code is also not too bad for this purpose and readability.

[zzzcpan]

> It's _also_ a very reasonable & readable amount of text in a row

Presumably, that's why they used 80 characters in the first place, as anything more is too hard to read.

[TheOtherHobbes]

132 column displays were common by the end of the 1970s.

80 column displays date back to the early 1970s.

I started coding on an 80 column display, and I have no doubt at all that a modern 16:9 monitor that can display a double page PDF or a web page with a variety of fonts is a much better display device.

[lmm]

It was 80 columns to match a punch card, AIUI, not a decision on readability grounds at all.

[robotresearcher]

And why was a punch card 80 columns?

[Gruselbauer]

Isn't it more so it is readable inside a phone display to an ssh session as well as a fat 4K screen? That's my reason at least. Can always scale up something, but line breaks I didn't make myself make me want to commit unspeakable atrocities in the name of a demonic deity taking the earthly form of a little girl. Or, you know, angry.

[yellowapple]

I'm one of those people, though my reason is more so that I can fit more code windows side-by-side (especially on a system with a tiling window manager, like the laptop on which I'm typing this comment) and not have to deal with horizontal scrolling or weird word wrapping that's out of my control.

It also helps to keep my code readable; the shorter the line, the quicker I can work out what exactly that line happens to do. In the vast majority of cases, an inability to keep a line within 72 characters is a line that needs refactored.

[esonderegger]

I tend to agree with you, but I think it's important to constantly be trying to understand where other people are coming from. They might not be so unreasonable; they just have different priorities than we do.

Our idea of what a webpage is might be a text document where the presentation is less important than the content. To others, the presentation IS the content. For some people, it might depend on what message the page is trying to convey.

[alanh]

Where you are wrong, I think, is that “the presentation IS the content” is a common belief among “designers” but almost never the belief of users.

[myrion]

That's not really true. They won't consciously believe that, but they won't use the technically superior product, if the competitor has the basics and a better design.

[cool-RR]

I think that designers are always trying to get the latest, coolest fonts. If you make Roboto and friends part of the OS, then you'll get a new wave of cool new fonts that aren't a part of the OS. There's always a push from people to have their website look special, and, dare I say it, pop.

[esonderegger]

There are definitely designers who are going for pop by looking for a new font, but I've worked on a lot of projects where the designer just wanted a good, legible, sans-serif that looks the same everywhere.

Who am I kidding, what they want is Helvetica and for the website to look exactly like the comps they made in Photoshop. Sometimes they're willing to find the money for the license fee and sometimes they're willing to accept Source Sans as a substitute. I've never once had them say "the difference between Helvetica and Arial isn't worth the 250ms delay caused by using a web font."

[colejohnson66]

But what about Arial versus Helvetica Neue? /s

[Gracana]

Why can't we just deal with the fact that different devices will display your content differently? The world doesn't need better fonts, the world needs better designers.

[matt4077]

> Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one line on a Mac (Helvetica)?

Yeah, I have. In the 90ies. Saying that it's a reason for any designer of any website that matters today is just trying to set up a strawman.