[mrweasel]

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.

[thingsgoup]

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.

[MrPatan]

I do front end. It's a waste of time. Pick a common one you like and move on.

[setr]

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.

[KronisLV]

> 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.)

[mrweasel]

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.

[setr]

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)

[hexo]

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.

[chrisseaton]

> why do anyone care about which font is used as long as the basics such as fixed or sans serif is applied correctly?

Because typography is a means of communication.

[mrweasel]

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.

[chrisseaton]

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.

[zelphirkalt]

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.

[chrisseaton]

I guess there aren’t any commercial incentives to do that.

But that doesn’t change that typography is valuable.

[zelphirkalt]

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.

[fock]

Then they might stick to pdfs, ragged-left blocks of text suck.

[hexo]

Exactly!