One humorous thing that's stuck with me is the professional typography community's distaste for Arial. Why hate Arial? As an outsider reading about it, it seems like one of those things that really only those in the know, know. One detailed explanation can be found here. About the closest thing I can compare it to is why do computer hackers generally hate Windows and love Linux--you really can't explain that to a normal person who uses Windows for normal stuff, and it generally works just fine. On the surface, the whole Arial thing has to do with it being a notably poor knockoff of Helvetica, the beloved font of designers everywhere. While it was created to be a drop-in replacement, certain things about it are subtly different and look ugly to the trained eye. Compare Arial on the left to Helvetica on the right, and judge if you think one is better than the other (you might read How to Spot Arial first):
I'd have to agree that Arial's R is indeed, well, rather pointy and unattractive, like a pirate's peg-leg or something. Since learning about this, it's become fun to try to spot Arial when used in various everyday places. For example, one of my favorite magazines, Discover, uses what appears to be Arial on their web site and on the top of every magazine (the 'R' is the dead giveaway, as well as the 'C'):
Compare this to what I created in TextEdit with Arial Narrow, it looks like all they did was squish it together a bit:
It's easy to get carried away. America's Most Fonted: The 7 Worst Fonts describes several fonts you should never use, including Comic Sans and Papyrus, which (ack!) I think I had on my wedding invitations.
If nothing else, this shows how easy it is as to make what more trained eyes would see as a n00b mistake when it comes to design. Hire someone who knows, when it matters.
In the news recently, Firefox 3.5 joins other browsers in supporting the CSS tag
@font-face. Designers can now instruct a visitor's browser
to download and use specific fonts on your page, which seems great, given the otherwise
unpredictable and varied selection that otherwise exists by default. Again, it's highly
browser dependent, but with Firefox now supporting it, there's a good chance a fair
percentage of your audience will benefit. I switched the heading at the top of every
article to use a cool looking font, Graublau Sans Web (freely
licensed), with the following css:
@font-face {
font-family: "Graublau Sans Web";
src: url("http://www.kehlet.cx/fonts/GraublauWeb.otf") format("opentype");
}
@font-face {
font-family: "Graublau Sans Web";
font-weight: bold;
src: url("http://www.kehlet.cx/fonts/GraublauWebBold.otf") format("opentype");
}
#articleHeading {
font-family: "Graublau Sans Web", "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif;
.....
}
As you can see, it will try to use the new font first, but fall back to how I had it
before: Lucida Grande (on Macs) or Lucida Sans Unicode (on Windows). And it looks like
the following, compare it to what you see:
To much to say on this topic. Some interesting links:
- The hazy future of Web typography
- Comic Sans, a fascinating documentary about the oft-reviled Comic Sans font. The opening quote from the creator of Comic Sans, Vincent Connare, is great: "If you love it, you don't know much about typography. And if you hate it, you really don't know much about typography either and you should get another hobby."
- The Top 100 Best Fonts Of All Time (note: Helvetica is #1)
- Page Type Classification eBook. Free (registration required) PDF discussing the 10 broad classifications of type.
- 30 Fonts That All Designers Must Know & Should Own. Caslon is mesmerizing. Mac OS X appears to come with Big Caslon.