Lowest Common Denominator Typography
By \ July 11, 2006
Once again, this past week I was faced with yet another web design project where a decision was made to switch the body text back from Georgia to Verdana, but I put up the good fight for Arial and then it was settled. I was left feeling less than victorious. In another recent project, I convinced a willing client to deviate from their headline font of choice and opt for system text so that every time an inevitable edit was to be made in the future, a new graphic wouldn’t have to be generated by whoever had the specific font. At least I have enough experience to not get sucked into the “final content” trick. (How many times have you seen this? revised_content-finalfinal.8.2_r3.txt)
Modern Life is Rubbish does a nice job of summarizing the limited legacy font set that designers are left to work with and describes their pros and cons fairly accurately.
Does anyone remember seeing sIFR? I know I got all excited about it when I did, probably a year ago, but I honestly have never seen it used in real life. In researching, I saw references to a new group of onscreen fonts Microsoft was unveiling about a year ago, but they promise to be problematic at best for Mac users (imagine that).
So as the internet continues to grow exponentially, and CSS gains more momentum, power and control, I continue to wonder if/when the typeface issue will ever be resolved. I’m looking forward to some feedback.