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by deckard1
1197 days ago
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> that the user is used to That's not the point of typography or design. People are used to Comic Sans. That doesn't make it a good choice. Some designs call for something that stands out in a unique way. If you are going to the trouble of finding an "atmosphere" for your site and researching the fonts you are using then why just throw that all out with a "stack" and sort of kind of but not really getting it right? Here's the bigger problem. No two fonts have the same font metrics. Go to the Github page: https://github.com/system-fonts/modern-font-stacks#css-font-.... These fonts are all using the same font size, weight, etc. but they are drastically different. Calibri and DejaVu do not render remotely the same. DejaVu might be readable at a certain size where Gill Sans Nova is going to be rather awful. These are all within the same font stack. Even in the "Preview Rendering" you can see it cheated by having the footnote that says "These fonts have been size-adjusted for easier comparison." How are you planning to do that in CSS? You can't. All this effort is wasted. You can just pick "sans-serif" and let the user use whatever they have set in the browser. That's better anyway, especially for a blog type layout which is the only layout that would make sense and not completely break with a font stack. |
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> People are used to Comic Sans. That doesn't make it a good choice.
Sure. Familiarity is not a sufficient condition. I was assuming well designed fonts for reading several paragraphs.
Comic Sans is suitable (and well designed) for comics. But it is so overused everywhere that other fonts would be preferable for this - I know it seems I contradict myself since I'm also stating that familiar fonts are better, but I think there's a difference between such fonts and more neutral fonts that need to be used for several paragraphs. And I believe familiarity for the more neutral fonts can help because you don't have to "decipher" the font anymore.
> Some designs call for something that stands out in a unique way.
Indeed. I was assuming a standard web page, or a standard web app here to convey information or be functional. For such pages, I don't think it matters if the font is not exactly at the same size when rendered as when designed. The page is already going to be rendered on widely different screens and dispositions and its design should be reliant on such changes. Maybe choosing the default sans-serif font (for screens) with the default size is best for accessibility: you can be reasonably sure it will be displayed well for users with their settings.
Now, with font stacks, you can leave out the outliers and pick a font size that's not at the edge of readability.