[ardy42]

> Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

Because they hate me. I disable font smoothing on my machines. Custom typefaces usually have poor hinting, which means they look terrible without smoothing (e.g. inconstant line thickness and inconsistent spacing).

The fonts that ship with Windows and Mac OS are wonderfully hinted, and appear crisp and clean without font smoothing. I curse the day web fonts were invented and gave the industry bad excuses not to use them.

Google is the absolute worst here. They use custom fonts heavily now, and somehow they're not even blockable with the Font Blocker extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/font-blocker/knpga...).

[asaph]

> I disable font smoothing on my machines.

Why?

[ardy42]

Because if you're not using a retina-type display, it can make text look blurry and out of focus. I'm nearsighted but take my glasses off at computers, and the blurriness is an unconscious cue to move my head closer to bring things into focus, which is futile with fonts that are born blurry.

I also personally like the look of well-hinted screen fonts.

[ramraj07]

Do you still use a 1024 x 768 monitor or what?

[FPGAhacker]

Fonts look pretty bad on my monitors at work in some apps (putty is giving me grief at the moment). x1080 is pretty common native, and is not too far off from 768.

The right font matters a lot to me. I like thin sans serif...always looking for a font that resembles what I saw on an old Apollo workstation (if I recall correctly, and I probably don’t).

Source Code Pro seems to be the best I’ve found, but I can’t get it to look right in putty.

[ardy42]

> Do you still use a 1024 x 768 monitor or what?

No, I have some nice, large 16:10 monitors.

However, that brings up a good point: if you're designing your stuff to only look good on a MacBook's retina display, you're doing it wrong.

[rleigh]

You need to cater for both nowadays, I think.

I recently upgraded from a 26" 16:10 1920×1200 display to a similarly-sized 16:9 4K display. I ran them side-by-side for a few days to compare. The difference in text quality was night and day. After using the 4K for a week the quality of the old display looked terrible: blurry and unreadable. Like going back to 800×600! I sold it; I saw no value in it as a secondary display. If I do ever need a second, it will be another 4K. Or 8K when it's available and affordable. If you're developing, writing or reading all day long, the improved legibility makes such a difference for ease of reading, eyestrain and headaches that it makes little sense to retain the old.

We clearly need to support low DPI displays for some time to come; the installed base is huge. However, high DPI displays are the future, and it's going to be increasingly a requirement that they are also properly catered for.

I'm not a particularly big fan of the trend by Microsoft (for example) to use very thin fonts with Windows 10. Just because you can to show off the technology, doesn't mean you should. I'd prefer bolder, more easily legible text even with a hi-DPI display, even if the thin ones are fashionable for some reason.

[mark-r]

I only wish 4K was offered in 16:10, or just that 16:10 was more popular in general. I'll be hanging on to my 1920x1200 until it dies.

[rleigh]

Yes, it is annoying. However, it's not as bad as I thought it might be. Since the display is quite big in size, I generally use one window on each half of the display and I don't feel I'm really missing out on vertical space too much. The DPI is sufficiently high that I don't find the horizontal size too small either, which was certainly the case with half of a 1920×1200 display previously.

On the other hand, it's sufficiently big that I don't generally need such a large space. I could have gone with a physically smaller 4K display with a higher DPI and still been very happy.

[eiaoa]

My main problem with 16:9 is how obscenely long they are. I use my monitors to do work, not watch movies, so I have a lot more need for vertical real-estate.

Tilting them on their side doesn't help, because they're far too narrow that way.

[noir_lord]

Same, I have 2560x1440 at 24" at work and a 4K 27" at home, the Dell 24" 1920x1200 I replaced look terrible (and they where good in their day).

[hbosch]

Most of the brands in the linked blog post are actually designing for iPhone retina displays, most likely.

[mark-r]

Monitor resolutions have been stagnant for a very long time. The 1024 x 768 monitors of old were about the same DPI as today's 1920 x 1080 monitors, since the screens have gotten larger.

I blame Microsoft. For far too long Windows programs haven't been able to scale gracefully, making odd resolutions painful to work with.

[SilasX]

If your web interface breaks because someone is trying to see it on a small monitor, you probably did something very wrong on your end.

[KwanEsq]

Fortunately web fonts can be easily disabled in Firefox with the gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled pref in about:config.

[ardy42]

> Fortunately web fonts can be easily disabled in Firefox with the gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled pref in about:config.

I've tried that, but unfortunately it breaks websites that use custom fonts for interface icons.

[KwanEsq]

In that case I've recently discovered that the setting that disallows websites to choose their own fonts, browser.display.use_document_fonts = 0 , available in the advanced fonts dialog in the user-facing settings, seems to thread a middle ground of generally blocking web fonts, but still allowing icon fonts (perhaps due to icons fonts being Private Use Area codepoints that won't have local fonts?).