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Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)

practicaltypography.com

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Re: Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)

#31

Post by technothrasher »

mrob wrote: post #17
pavlov wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the default for body text should be serif, with sans used for headlines and display text. There’s a reason books and magazines are set in serif fonts: they are easier to read for long text paragraphs. GUIs defaulted to sans serif fonts because displays didn’t have enough resolution to properly render serifs, but that’s mostly not the case anymore.

I don't think there's anything inherently more legible about either serif or sans-serif fonts. Whichever one you read the most will be most legible to you, which means the default shouldn't be changed even when it's no longer technically necessary.

Common wisdom is that serif fonts are easier to read, but most research I've read on the topic show either very small or no readability increase with serif over san-serif fonts.

As an example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4612630/

Re: Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)

#32

Post by [deleted] »

mtm7 wrote: post #23

I love a good font (and try to use one on my own blog), but part of me gets really giddy when I discover a site with very little styling. It's like I've found some secret oasis that's going to have a high signal-to-noise ratio, or at least some more "raw" writing than you'd find on ${popularNewsWebsite}. Some sites that come to mind: - https://danluu.com/ - https://100r.co/site/home.html - https://meagher.co/ - https…

[deleted]

Re: Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)

#33

Post by Fiveplus »

mtm7 wrote: post #23

I love a good font (and try to use one on my own blog), but part of me gets really giddy when I discover a site with very little styling. It's like I've found some secret oasis that's going to have a high signal-to-noise ratio, or at least some more "raw" writing than you'd find on ${popularNewsWebsite}. Some sites that come to mind: - https://danluu.com/ - https://100r.co/site/home.html - https://meagher.co/ - https…

To add to on-screen text - Calibri, Bahnschrift and Roboto have come out as my personal favorites. Of course some people prefer serif to non-serif and that's completely a subjective choice as well.

Re: Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)

#34

Post by aasasd »

slater wrote: post #30
hatmatrix wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is almost minimalist in the same vein. What's its font though? It's pretty nonoffensive.

Verdana

Edit: scratch this, forgot about the ‘HN Enhancement’ extension.

I see Helvetica Neue with fallback to Arial, and I checked that it's not my CSS.

Verdana is pretty crappy for texts of even a comment length, as it's wide as heck. I have to hack it out with CSS on sites that I use regularly, or the eye gets tired in minutes.

Re: Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)

#35

Post by jakear »

mtm7 wrote: post #23

I love a good font (and try to use one on my own blog), but part of me gets really giddy when I discover a site with very little styling. It's like I've found some secret oasis that's going to have a high signal-to-noise ratio, or at least some more "raw" writing than you'd find on ${popularNewsWebsite}. Some sites that come to mind: - https://danluu.com/ - https://100r.co/site/home.html - https://meagher.co/ - https…

Those (almost) all do reasonably well where most “minimalist” sites fail, accessibility. Many developers seem to get a kick out of “not caring about design”, as some sort of point of pride, but at the same time put in just enough CSS to screw over the visually-disabled.

HN, for instance, can’t be zoomed in iOS.

Also, the above macwright cuts off the titles to make room for the Dates, so to me the site looks like:

Rec...2020-06-01

Sec...2020-05-10

Link...2020-05-02

Rec...2020-05-01

Re: Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)

#36

Post by benhoyt »

I don't disagree with this from a design point of view (I'm not a designer), but I can't stand the modern web thing of "I'm using a fancy custom font, so you'll see website load and then flash over to the correct font after a second or two". In an attempt to use a slick font we've made things look really janky. But I guess it's not the designer's FOUT...

Re: Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)

#37

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

henriquez wrote: post #18

The DejaVu Serif fonts bundled with Ubuntu are a really nice alternative to Times New Roman (and much nicer licensing!) I have a hard time quantifying why, but they’re much easier on the eyes. Not a shameless plug I swear but we converted DejaVu Serif to a web font and used it here, if you want to see it “in action:” https://www.obsessivefacts.com/memespeech

Unfortunately, development of the DejaVu fonts stalled years ago. There are still some typographic infelicities that could be ironed out, and its Unicode coverage basically stopped at where Unicode was in the early millennium.

Re: Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)

#38

Post by logicprog »

I found a really good new font recently which I'm going to be using in place of Baskerville and Times New Roman, my two go-to serif fonts. It's called Literata[1], and it (to me at least) conveys this really nice professional, formal look, which approximates what I feel when I open a printed book, but on the screen. There's something to it that's hard to describe that I really like (also the italics is very good imo).

[1]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Literata?query=liter

Re: Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)

#39

Post by Fiveplus »

jakear wrote: post #35
mtm7 wrote: post #23

I love a good font (and try to use one on my own blog), but part of me gets really giddy when I discover a site with very little styling. It's like I've found some secret oasis that's going to have a high signal-to-noise ratio, or at least some more "raw" writing than you'd find on ${popularNewsWebsite}. Some sites that come to mind: - https://danluu.com/ - https://100r.co/site/home.html - https://meagher.co/ - https…

Those (almost) all do reasonably well where most “minimalist” sites fail, accessibility. Many developers seem to get a kick out of “not caring about design”, as some sort of point of pride, but at the same time put in just enough CSS to screw over the visually-disabled. HN, for instance, can’t be zoomed in iOS. Also, the above macwright cuts off the titles to make room for the Dates, so to me the site looks like: Rec…

What other parameters should be prioritized while developing websites before compromising accessibility for minimalism?

Re: Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)

#40

Post by ken »

He lists only three 'flaws' with Times New Roman. The first is:

> It was created for a newspaper, so it’s a bit narrower than most text fonts

yet all the alternatives are almost exactly the same width. Plantin is even a bit narrower. How do they "avoid its shortcomings"?

The second flaw is "italic is mediocre", which I'm not in a position to judge.

The third (and main) complaint is "it connotes apathy", and one of the suggested alternatives is:

> EQUITY (designed by me).

I'm all for artists promoting their work, as long as they're honest about it. This page is basically an ad, right?

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