Some commonly used fonts seem to evoke a lot of dislike, at least from a small group of people with strong beliefs:
- Arial: The Scourge of Arial
- Times New Roman: Are You a Times New Roman or a Tahoma
- Trajan: Trajan is the Movie Font (video).
- And the number one hated font of all time, Comic Sans: ban comic sans
- From the NY Times: Arial, Mon Amour, and Other Font Passions
To varying degrees, I agree with many of these. I’ve developed some opinions on fonts, both as a result of casual use, and most recently, trying to spend more time thinking about design. I’ve been redesigning my Wordpress theme (actually just writing a stylesheet for use with Sandbox.) Some of my personal feelings about fonts (which I’m not going to explain in detail at the moment): Some fonts are bad merely because they’ve been overused. Monospace fonts suck for everything but writing code. “Old-style” serif fonts, especially Palatino, look more interesting than Times New Roman. Serif fonts are less readable than sans-serif fonts at small sizes on low-resolution displays.
3 Comments
Comic Sans?!
http://m.assetbar.com/achewood/uuad4vm7n
Actually, what bothers me is all the web design that forces tiny fonts on my screen. (Like yours.) It seems easier to design things when you can make the fonts tiny: you get a bit of flexibility for specifying artificially narrow pages. (Like yours.) Fortunately, Firefox takes a bit of the sting out of tiny fonts with the Control + thing. Alas, Firefox 3 tries to scale the images up as well, which causes it to lock up on a lot of pages on my old P4. :/
My preference: not making the main font smaller than the default.
Cheers,
-danny
Agreed. (This current theme isn’t of my design.) My new wordpress theme will be respecting the default font size in the main body text.
With regard to firefox, a coworker recently recommended http://urandom.ca/nosquint/ — it can remember your zoom level on a per-site basis.