For this particular problem, it doesn't matter whether the site is serving "plain HTML" if the CSS specifies a webfont that the user doesn't already have.
So you have two alternatives for a good experience:
1. Use only fonts users have preinstalled.
2. Make sure that you handle downloading webfonts in an intelligent way.
For many sites, 1 is fine. But for others which try to set themselves apart with distinctive design, 2 is necessary.
No, 2 is never necessary. You can set yourself apart with design just fine. The text, actual information people are trying to retrieve, is not part of the design. Specifying a font for the ordinary text is a perfect example of designers prioritizing self-obsessed wankery over the user.
The idea that typography has nothing to do with design is ridiculous on its face. I get that you don't like webfonts and you are welcome to that opinion, but it's silly to suggest that font selection and the placement of text isn't properly the job of a designer.
I didn't suggest typography has nothing to do with design. Placement of text is not at issue here, font face choice is. There are many font faces already available. They were created by designers. Ones who specialize in creating fonts in fact. They are much better at it than web designers. Breaking a website so it is entirely unreadable because you feel a non-standard font is prettier is something a bad designer does. It does not help the user, which is the entire point of a web site.
> I didn't suggest typography has nothing to do with design. Placement of text is not at issue here, font face choice is.
Choice of typefaces is part of typography. You can't place text without a face.
> There are many font faces already available. They were created by designers. Ones who specialize in creating fonts in fact.
There are about 10 fonts you can rely on people having (assuming you don't care about Linux users!). Several of these are gimmicky and generally not a good choice for anything. You really don't have all that great a selection.
> Breaking a website so it is entirely unreadable because you feel a non-standard font is prettier is something a bad designer does.
The site isn't entirely unreadable. It just takes a little bit longer to display. A very similar thing happens when a resource takes a while to load and leaves the body text the same color as the background for a long time.
I'm a big advocate of having lean sites that display fast. When I'm asked to work on a site, the first thing I suggest is usually optimizing it so everyone sees it quickly (I had the biggest smile when I managed to cut one down from 20 seconds to 1.5 seconds on a slow-ish connection). But even I think just blanket damning custom fonts is really extreme. They really can add a lot to the feel and readability of a site, and they don't always suck.
>You really don't have all that great a selection.
Now go count how many books, newspapers, magazines, etc, etc have their primary text in something other than one of the few common "standard" fonts. You don't need a big selection. The desire to make your site look weird is not actually a necessity, it is a desire.
>The site isn't entirely unreadable. It just takes a little bit longer to display
It is until it loads all the way, which can take quite a long time, especially on a mobile network. And yes, it is actually fairly common for some elements to timeout and not load, images, css, javascript. If you use a non-standard font for the main text, then it becomes one of those things that can fail to load.
>But even I think just blanket damning custom fonts is really extreme
So do I. Which is why I never did that. I am only saying that using a custom font for the primary textual content of the site is a choice that has purely negative impact on the user.
> Now go count how many books, newspapers, magazines, etc, etc have their primary text in something other than one of the few common "standard" fonts.
That would be most of them. The LA Times uses Ionic, the New York Times uses Imperial, the Chicago Tribune uses Mercury Text, Entertainment Weekly uses Scout — I'd actually be really hard-pressed to think of a newspaper or magazine that sets its body text in Arial or Verdana.
> It is until it loads all the way, which can take quite a long time, especially on a mobile network. And yes, it is actually fairly common for some elements to timeout and not load, images, css, javascript. If you use a non-standard font for the main text, then it becomes one of those things that can fail to load.
This is kind of a browser-dependent thing. I would argue that any browsers that display this behavior are flawed and should be fixed. However, even on browsers that don't handle this gracefully, you can work around it and handle it gracefully yourself. So I agree that if this happens, you have done something wrong, but using a distinct font was not the mistake — coding your site in such a way that your body text might never display was the core problem.
Really? Of the millions of books, most of them use a special font? The hundreds of thousands of little local papers all have their own special font? Do a tiny minority who use a "virtually indistinguishable from Times" really constitute most of them? Is a font that <0.000001% of people can distinguish from Times really creating a unique and distinct design?
>I'd actually be really hard-pressed to think of a newspaper or magazine that sets its body text in Arial or Verdana.
I'd be hard pressed to think of one that uses comic sans too, that reflects on comic sans, not the necessity of unique fonts.
> Really? Of the millions of books, most of them use a special font?
They use something a fair sight better than what's available to web designers. Whether a font is "special" or not is kinda subjective. I would not consider Ubuntu to be any more "special" than Garamond. But they certainly do not feel constrained to use a handful of fonts Microsoft licensed back in the '90s.
> The hundreds of thousands of little local papers all have their own special font?
Nobody said anything about "their own special font." Any paper big enough to hire a designer probably uses something more than Arial and Times New Roman.
> Is a font that <0.000001% of people can distinguish from Times really creating a unique and distinct design?
I guess that depends. Do you think more than 0.000001% of the population could distinguish Georgia from Times? Many people couldn't name a font if you put a gun to their head, but that doesn't mean different fonts don't matter at all. (If you do want to argue that fonts don't matter at all beyond serif and sans serif, you're welcome to that opinion, but I'm not really interested in getting into that.)
>> I'd actually be really hard-pressed to think of a newspaper or magazine that sets its body text in Arial or Verdana.
> I'd be hard pressed to think of one that uses comic sans too, that reflects on comic sans, not the necessity of unique fonts.
We have just dismissed about 30% of the fonts available to web developers under your criteria. Do you still feel like they have a good selection?
Also, again, nobody said unique fonts. A font does not have to be unique to fit a design better than another font.
Your argument can be extended to most of website design. The identity of a design and the impact on accessibility are two factors that constantly have to be weighted against each other in web design. Do you choose a slightly gray text color which improves the overall appearance of the text but reduces the contrast? Do you include images? There are hundreds of excellent text fonts out there and the more you work with them, the more you realize that they do have different characteristics other than the serif/non-serif distinction. Only a handful of fonts are installed on most computers, so the decision becomes: Do you choose a font that doesn’t really fit the design in order to safe a moment when loading the page or do you go with a web font and optimize the loading procedure (CDN…) and get a coherent design? Can you express more of the visual identity by removing an image and including a web font instead?
>Your argument can be extended to most of website design.
Certainly, as it should be.
>Do you choose a slightly gray text color which improves the overall appearance of the text but reduces the contrast
No, you do not. Good example.
>Do you include images?
Including images does not make the site inaccessible. Bad example.
>Can you express more of the visual identity by removing an image and including a web font instead?
We're talking about the primary textual content of the site. Not a header, or a menu item, or a title. Very few people are crazy enough to render the entire text of their site as an image.
The point is, in web design there are a lot of different aspects that have to be balanced. One of them is accessibility & speed, an other one is visual design and identity. The choice of a web font over one of the ~6 standard fonts affects both of these and there is a choice to make.
This choice can be: I use a web font because this allows me to convey 80% of my visual identity with the text, I can put the text (and content) as the central element of the page and include no images on the page except for a small logo, leading to a fast loading page. For this, I accept that the user has to wait a little bit until the text is displayed when he/she visits the page the first time and the font isn’t cached yet. On a decent internet connection this might not be noticeable but on a bad 3G connection it might take the page load from 4s to 6s. Do the benefits outweigh the risks/disadvantages?
I do agree though that this decision is often not made consciously and a lot of times a web font is slapped upon a site just because we can. Way too often, visual designers create pictures of websites in Photoshop with no idea about the implications. On the other hand, I have seen that the rise of web fonts has made designers shift away from creating designs that are basically a frame with the visual identity where they slap in some random content. A lot of sites now treat the content as the main element of the site, reducing all other elements to a minimum. I would argue that this change greatly improves the quality of web sites and that the rise of web fonts is one of the main drivers of this change.
>use a web font because this allows me to convey 80% of my visual identity with the text
You lost me here. You convey absolutely no visual identity like that. People are reading the text, it is not window dressing. I'm sure marketing would be shocked to hear they don't need to worry about logos or colours or branding any more, because they can convey 80% of their identity just by using a font where the a has a 1% longer tail.
This. This is the reason people are reacting poorly to what you're saying. Pretending that a sweeping statement like that can cover every possible website is _absurd_. The same goes for webfonts.
The question you're answering was not meant to be answered by you. It has to be weighed by each site designer. Saying otherwise is offensive to the people who take the time to answer those kind of questions differently for each project they work on.
>This is the reason people are reacting poorly to what you're saying
I didn't see anyone react poorly. There is nothing bad about polite disagreement. I enjoy hearing other people's views, and having them try to convince me of the merits of their views.
>Pretending that a sweeping statement like that can cover every possible website is _absurd_
I obviously disagree. Can you give me an example of where deliberately choosing to make your website harder to read is a good choice? And that would be considered good web design?
I specified that #2 is sometimes necessary for a specific end (distinctive design). You seem to be arguing that one should never seek that end. I disagree, but that's an entirely different argument.
>You seem to be arguing that one should never seek that end.
Not at all. I am saying it is in no way necessary to load a non-standard font for the primary textual content in order to achieve the goal of a distinctive design. Loading a font to use for your branding is perfectly reasonable, users aren't there to read that anyways. Punishing the user by making the content not be there because you think distinctive design requires all your text to be unreadble_font_x just bad design.
So all of a sudden we have become a design Nazi and telling people what their website can or can't include for design.
The alternative to not allowing custom fonts is that people go back to using text in images to display their custom fonts which sucks when you are dealing with multiple languages or just want to change the text for something else. Or something like Cufon [http://cufon.shoqolate.com]. Or use flash.
I think I prefer webfonts, the developers just need to be smarter about how they are used and the implementation for including them.
Specifying a font for the ordinary text is a perfect example of designers prioritizing self-obsessed wankery over the user.
It's a common phrase used through the US and Europe incidently, and used in the context of what you stated I don't think it is repulsive, but chc has already explained that to you.
I don't think my post is nonsense, but just like you, I am entitled to my opinion. Text is not just for reading, it is also used for design so my opinion is that web fonts have a place on the web, the developers just needed to smarter in the the implementation as I said. With all the sites done these days with HTML5 and CSS3 and using techniques such as parallax scrolling, I don't think half of them would have the effect that they do with "Arial" or "Sans Serif". The web goes beyond reading articles on on HN or NYT believe it or not.
You may be either very young or not an American English speaker, but the phrase "X Nazi" is American slang denoting somebody who is overly strict about whatever X is. It comes from the "Soup Nazi" episode of Seinfeld, in which a soup shop owner would evict customers from his shop with the declaration "NO SOUP FOR YOU" if they didn't follow a very precise procedure for ordering. It is not actually an accusation of Nazism.
That is why I said hyperbolic. It is still a very distasteful response, especially considering what it was replying to. I just read my post again, and I still can't find the part where I told "people what their website can or can't include for design".
You said any designer who chooses a body text font (something designers have been doing for hundreds of years, incidentally) is guilty of "self-obsessed wankery." The difference between that and telling people what they can or can't include is pretty slim.
No, I said a designer who chooses to make their website less usable for the user by forcing a download of a non-standard font (something that hasn't existed for hundreds of years, incidentally) is prioritizing their self-obsessed wankery over what is best for the user.
The difference between that and telling people what they can and can't include is absolutely massive. I am telling web designers (people whose job is to make web content accessible to users) that making content inaccessible is bad design. I am not saying "you can not be a bad designer". You are still allowed to do a bad job. And the rest of the world is allowed to point out that you are doing a bad job. Calling someone a nazi for pointing out that bad design is bad design is not constructive, or productive.
So you have two alternatives for a good experience:
1. Use only fonts users have preinstalled. 2. Make sure that you handle downloading webfonts in an intelligent way.
For many sites, 1 is fine. But for others which try to set themselves apart with distinctive design, 2 is necessary.