Bradley Taunt is inveighing against the use of custom web fonts and if you know me at all you can guess that I agree with him.
I was trying to understand how we ended up in a situation where web/UI designers (myself included) have started to insist on using proprietary, custom web fonts. Do any users actively benefit from custom web fonts? Are there any useful and measurable goals achieved by including them? Do end-users actually care about a website’s typeface?
I have a good guess as to how we got into a situation where web/UI designers have started to insist on using proprietary, custom web fonts.
In the case of web designers, they have been trying to ape print media since the late 1990s. If a web page doesn’t look exactly like their Photoshop mockup everyone in the building can hear them having a shit hemorrhage. If an element is one pixel to the left of where it “should” be according to the mockup because the demo was done on Internet Explorer 6 and nobody thought to account for Microsoft’s inability to comply with web standards, designers lose their minds.
So it’s only natural that they’re going to insist on fancy fonts even though that causes problems:
- flashes of unknown content
- excessive requests to third-party sites for web fonts
- slow page rendering
- excessive bandwidth and data use
- Google knowing you’re visiting the site even if Google Analytics isn’t in use
You can avoid a lot of unnecessary headaches by using only system fonts, but if you’re building a website or web app for somebody else it’s probably not your decision.
For example, I’m working on modernizing a state government web app for benefits applications at my day job. They want to make it mobile-friendly. And instead of using system fonts they’re using custom web fonts. So much for mobile-friendly; responsive design is nice, but avoiding bloat is just as important. At least we’re self-hosting the damn things since we’re packaging the application with webpack
. Of course, my mention of webpack
should tell you that this app is built on node.js and some kind of JavaScript framework.
Fortunately, it’s Angular and not React. Nevertheless, the fact that this is a single page app built with any sort of JS framework means there are bigger problems involved than the use of custom web fonts.
Am I going to push back? Of course not. Design decisions like these are not only above my pay grade, they’re usually made before I even get involved with the project. Thus I find myself wondering who Bradley is addressing with his post. Hopefully other designers, or developers who also wear the designer hat because they’re working at a shop where everbody has at least two roles but only gets one paycheck.
Because if he’s addressing developers or personal website operators like me, he’s preaching to the choir. I mean, look at this motherfucking website. Do it look like the work of a web designer to you? You’re lucky it has a stylesheet at all because I do my testing in Lynx.
But let’s look at some of his other points:
All of this for the sake of a company’s “brand”. I say: fuck your brand. Your end-users should always trump your design “guidelines”. Period.
Fortunately I’m not a company and I don’t have a brand unless you want to get into that “personal branding” bullshit. But we’ll get to that shortly.
People work on different systems with different constraints and settings. Embrace that - don’t try to override it.
I’m already doing enough by asking browsers to render my text in orange on black unless the browser specifically requests a light theme. Whether they do so isn’t up to me; somebody could be reading my site with Lynx, w3m, or the Emacs Web Wowser (eww). Or they might be using a graphical browser with CSS disabled for whatever reason. I don’t know, and it’s none of my business.
I understand this sounds harsh, but many designers design more for their own ego and portfolio rather than the end-user.
This bit is under the heading “Loss of Personality”, but there isn’t much about personality here. Nevertheless, I think what Bradley’s getting at is that designers need to ask themselves who they’re trying to impress a lot more often than they do. For my part, I suspect that if my writing isn’t up to snuff then the use of custom web fonts or excessively fancy design is an exercise in putting lipstick on a pig.
A lot of designers I’ve worked with or talked to in the past tend to be big supporters of reducing their carbon footprint and minimizing their individual output of “waste”. What I always find interesting is how that never seems to translate into their work.
I’m definitely not a designer, and my use of secondhand equipment over the years has been more about saving money than saving the planet, but there’s another reason I try to avoid bloat when designing my website. I remember what it was like to browse the web on 56K dialup. When somebody wasn’t keeping dialup users in mind, it was obvious. I don’t want somebody to not be able to read my bullshit just because their connection sucks.