On 26/01/2012 09:02, Little, David wrote:
> Personally I'm looking forward to the days when poorly spaced 10pt Arial
> flowing on for eternity (Wikipedia and about a million other sites I'm
> looking at you) disappears forever. Web typography has come a long way in
> the last couple of years so there's a great deal of information out
> there[1] and you can use fonts beyond the standard selection using
> services like Typekit, Fontdeck (paid) or Google Web Fonts (free).
>
> [1] http://webtypography.net/ for instance.
>
> David
>
That page didn't look great when I viewed it, which was kinda odd,
considering the subject matter. The serifs of the skinny white body text
were "flaring" against the dark red background, and the result wasn't
terribly nice. The font looked suspiciously like Times New Roman.
I tried it on recent versions of Firefox and Chrome under WinXP, and it
looked the same ... it wasn't until I tried it on Explorer 8 that a
different set of font settings kicked in and the thing finally looked
tasteful (with heavier body-text and a different font), and I realised
what the designer had been aiming for.
So I'm guessing that the page either assumes some sort of font system
that's IE-specific, or has some other problem when viewed on other
browsers, or requires Win7/OSX.
I'm guessing that it probably looks marvelous on a Mac, but this isn't a
"Mac vs PC" thing, because Safari on my (2010) iPod Touch also doesn't
show the intended font, and also does some odd things with relative font
sizes in the title.
All these platforms also had the same problem in that the "/of/" and
"/to the/" in the title were the same size as the rest of the text
(bigger, on the iPod!), so that the inconsequential text ended up
emphasised, and (due to the way that the slanted strokes draw) bolder
than the rest of the title. This was also the behaviour with Firefox and
Chromium running under Ubuntu Linux 10.10.
This confused me, because normally you'd only italicise those minor
words if they were also smaller than the rest of the text, or
de-emphasised in some other way.
On a Samsung Android 2.2 mini-tablet ... lo and behold, all was
revealed, the correct fonts showed up ... /and/ the minor words were
(appropriately) smaller than the rest of the title text, so it seems
that the designer probably originally did a good job, it's just that
their design wasn't being shown "as intended" on a range of platforms.
Oh, one last problem. Although the pages do look admittedly lovely and
wonderful on the Android browser in portrait mode, when you rotate it
into landscape mode, the landing page title text overlaps itself, giving
a bit of a jumble.
If this website's typography has particular OS requirements, then (since
it's a site /about/ website typography) I think that info should
probably be on the landing page.
Eric
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