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Beautiful web type: highlighting the best of the Google web fonts directory

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Re: Beautiful web type: highlighting the best of the Google web fonts directory

#31

Post by thristian »

chlee wrote: post #26
thristian wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, don't use Arimo, or its identical twin Liberation Sans. It is to Arial what Arial is to Helvetica; a metrics-compatible replacement that tries to do its own thing and winds up just awkward. The stupid little serif on J annoys me to no end, and all the capitals look almost like small-caps compared to the lower-case. By contrast, Open Sans is lovely, go nuts with it. :)

Thanks for the feedback :D I need a good alternative to Arial. Do you have any other recommendations from google web fonts?

I can't (off the top of my head) think of any Google Web Fonts entries that are quite as bare-bones plain as Arial, but you might want to look at Open Sans (mentioned previously), Lato, PT Sans... maybe Asap, Signika, Cabin. That should be enough to get started with. :)

Re: Beautiful web type: highlighting the best of the Google web fonts directory

#32

Post by woodpanel »

Disclaimer: I worked in print design for a while on Mac+Win. I know typography and optics. The linked Website is butiful, so are the fonts there. What I'am writing is propably off-topic and a general objection to some statements made in the comments here.

1) the google web fonts directory is very nice, but does anyone really consider those fonts for readable body text? They are great for headlines and short snippets but a complete article - no thank you. There is a great difference between fancyness and usability.

2) One Exemple is this myth, that OSX' font rendering is always better thant the rendering of windows' rendering because OSX applies more anti-aliasing to the fonts. As soon as you get to a certain font size - usually the one you use for articles - anti-aliased fonts are a pain-in-the-eyes.

3) They might appear worn out but those boring old fonts, like Verdana, that took months to built and cost real money are still the most reliable when it comes to body text. They are boring because there are few alternatives.

4) Microsoft payed above average for their fonts. Maybe more than the customers appreciate. But everytime I sit in front of an iPad, MacBook and the like, those dirty fonts destroy the whole product for me. The only way apple is gonna get rid of that cheap rendering performance is by investing in their rendering engine (not gonna happen) or by introducing retina displays in all of their products (more likely to happen).

Re: Beautiful web type: highlighting the best of the Google web fonts directory

#33

Post by slamdunc »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #15
slamdunc wrote: post #2

Lato is one of my current favorites, glad you included it. Orbitron, Jura and Cabin also work well in certain places. I do wish there were more fonts with 3+ styles (reg, bold and ital at least), though I'm sure that'll change with time.

> I do wish there were more fonts with 3+ styles (reg, bold and ital at least) On a related note, this was linked from a few places the other day: http://somadesign.ca/demos/better-google-fonts/

Nice - "Because web designers want font families, not just fonts." Thanks for the link, Chris.

Re: Beautiful web type: highlighting the best of the Google web fonts directory

#34

Post by tstegart »

pg_bot wrote: post #25
tstegart wrote: post #10

So what are the first two fonts? That's frustrating they're not named.

Helpful hint: you can check out all of the page's css using the inspector. For this case you can see that what font-family is declared, and then reference it on google. Using this technique you can add styles on the fly to your sites and check them out as you are designing.

Thanks, I didn't know that.

Re: Beautiful web type: highlighting the best of the Google web fonts directory

#36

Post by tripzilch »

While that looks really pretty, it's not really useful.

This could have been a great article if they hadn't just gone for the easy eye candy but instead actually discuss the fonts in question?

- name of the font

- style of the font (sans, slab-serif, etc)

- who made the font, what style is it based on, what was the designer's purpose/goal with this font

- what does the author of the article think the font is good for

- how complete is the font, what characters does it support, quite a few of them don't even have most of the basic symbols from lower ASCII, that's pretty important to be aware of or you get unpleasant surprises long after the design is done

- how well is the font kerned? this is probably the worst omission, because the OP is actively misleading on this front, look at the source code and notice the special "kern" classes--and just stop right there and close the tab.

Manual kerning, really? Having to do that before a font looks good pretty much excludes it from any serious consideration for usage as a web font. Utterly worthless!

Imagine explaining to a client you designed a website for, that if they need to add new content to the CMS, they must manually kern the headlines! ... errr ... manually do the whut now?

Re: Beautiful web type: highlighting the best of the Google web fonts directory

#37

Post by socksy »

woodpanel wrote: post #32

Disclaimer: I worked in print design for a while on Mac+Win. I know typography and optics. The linked Website is butiful, so are the fonts there. What I'am writing is propably off-topic and a general objection to some statements made in the comments here. 1) the google web fonts directory is very nice, but does anyone really consider those fonts for readable body text? They are great for headlines and short snippets…

> One Exemple is this myth, that OSX' font rendering is always better thant the rendering of windows' rendering because OSX applies more anti-aliasing to the fonts. As soon as you get to a certain font size - usually the one you use for articles - anti-aliased fonts are a pain-in-the-eyes.

It's not quite that simple, and I'm not sure everyone would agree with that assertion. It's more to do with the fact that the font rendering is done differently (regarding whether the "pixel grid" is respected) rather than more anti-aliasing is applied.

> Microsoft payed above average for their fonts. Maybe more than the customers appreciate. But everytime I sit in front of an iPad, MacBook and the like, those dirty fonts destroy the whole product for me. The only way apple is gonna get rid of that cheap rendering performance is by investing in their rendering engine (not gonna happen) or by introducing retina displays in all of their products (more likely to happen).

Apple paid for their professional fonts too, even including Zapfino — simply to show off their font rendering. It's not cheaper, and they already invest a lot in to their rendering engine, which has improved in leaps and bounds over different versions of Mac OS X. Fonts that looks good on Mac OS X can come out terrible on Windows because manual hinting to every typeface has to be applied to make them look good, or Cleartype will come along and distort all the character forms.

The only reason you think Apple's font rendering is cheap is because you're not used to it — and it pervades everything you read. In contrast, to me Windows fonts look "cheaper", in that they're all thin and sickly. However, it should be understood that's it's a subjective choice, rather than one necessarily being better than another.

http://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophi... and http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp... might be interesting reading.

Re: Beautiful web type: highlighting the best of the Google web fonts directory

#38

Post by jebblue »

tuacker wrote: post #4

Why do fonts look like ants chipped away some pixels in chrome/win7? They look better in Firefox but I remember OSX looking better still, can be wrong about that though since I hadn't access to one in a long time. But fonts in Chrome are plain ugly, someone please turn on AA. FF on the left, Chrome on the right: http://i.imgur.com/SxlaT.png

They look fine in Chrome on Ubuntu at least to my eyes.

Re: Beautiful web type: highlighting the best of the Google web fonts directory

#39

Post by jebblue »

If you want more fonts to choose from on Ubuntu, you can download the fonts using Mercurial as described here:

http://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/

As a nice twist I tested and found that if you place your googlefontdirectory in $HOME/.fonts then the gnome-tweak-tool will scan and pick up the fonts, even in Unity!

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