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by ubuwaits 2563 days ago
I'm the maintainer of this project. Happy to take any feedback or suggestions.

At the end of last year/beginning of this year, I was working on this site heavily and attempted to use Patreon to fund the project. Ultimately, I didn't see enough interest and scaled back my time on it.

I still think it's a worthy goal to give an in-depth overview of the best typefaces, but I'm still looking for the right way of promoting and funding the project.

9 comments

This is an excellent resource, and I think what impresses me most, beyond the design and comprehensiveness, is the curation. I considered myself fairly familiar with the current SIL type landscape, yet I had never heard of half of the type families on the home page, all of which look to be of a caliber with the best open-source (or otherwise) types out there.
Have you considered a book? Maybe update it every few years.

Lots of projects don't want to spend big on type but the designer can still probably expense a printed book to act as a catalog.

Thanks for a very interesting and well presented collection. The suggested uses section is thoughtful. I was wondering if it might be possible to add some info on the original motivation/intent/application of the typeface. This is to see if it can help suggest a typeface's "natural" use.
The website is called Beautiful Web Type. Nonetheless, it would be nice if you could also add recommendations for print, not only screen reading. I'm not sure how much this influences your decisions, but it might be worth screening fonts for print (and low-resolution print) specifically.
Thanks for this site! I was going to request a way to type one's own text and see how it looks in the different typefaces, but the feature is already present: the text in the "compared with similar typefaces" section is editable! Maybe this could be slightly more discoverable that this text is editable.
I'd love to see EB Garamond on your serif list! It's my favorite open source garalde by a good measure.
If you want the best, step 1 is to eliminate anything with the Vera "l". The foot at the bottom is dreadful.

Step 2 is to eliminate anything with an "@" that doesn't have all 4 vertical lines when cut horizontally. That is, it should contain a full "a" of some sort, without the loss of a gap between the "a" and the surrounding circle.

After that there won't be many fonts left. Prefer a "$" that has both vertical bars. Prefer (){}{} that are tall, reaching both above and below a "X".

Make note of the tilde, asterisk, "a", and "g". These are notable for the style they give the font, but it is less clear what might be best.

No suggestions but the design and utility is beautiful.
Would be cool to add Inconsolata/Ligconsolata to the monospace list... It's hands down my favorite monospace font.