Blessing of Fonts
My oldest son is really into calligraphy. He is mastering several different types of formal script. Who knows, maybe he will design a new font someday.
Today, fonts seemed to be a recurrent theme in my blog-surfing.
God, how twee is that? “Slightly irritated by a typeface.” Put that on my tombstone.
- James Lileks, 8 August 2005 Bleat
Lynn muses about the emotional impact of fonts on a reader. She is seeking some input on what fonts you like, what color, size, style. Leave her a comment and let her know what you think.
I like sans-serif fonts the best. I use Verdana for most everything I write. It makes for wonderfully readable legal forms, not too busy and easy to fax or scan without too much clutter. For web style, I prefer dark text on light backgrounds, though there are some well-executed blogs that pull off the opposite.
If I had to use a serif font, I would choose Palatino, which is simply beautiful. I don't care for Times New Roman, as I associate it (and Courier) with poorly-drafted legalese. I see way too much lawyer work-product drafted in Times New Roman 12 pt., 1.25 inch margins (i.e. MS Word default settings).
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Lemuel reveals himself to be a sans-serif man. I would think he would be a sans-blog man by now, since he keeps threatening to delete the thing.
On a wholly-unrelated note, I wonder whether anyone can guess the source of this post's title?
Well, Galveston recently had the blessing of the shrimp boat fleet, but I doubt that's what you were referring to.
Posted by: owlish at August 9, 2005 12:14 AMIt's actually a play on the hymn title: "Come Thou Font of Every Blessing."
I thought I would be clever and use "Font of all Wisdom," but a quick google search revealed that idea had been done almost to death in many other similar articles about typefaces.
I guess I need to reform. I had no idea that Times New Roman was so offensive. I just use it because I know most people have it. To me, it looks almost exactly like most of the other serif fonts.
Posted by: Lynn S at August 10, 2005 05:22 PMLynn, in the overall scheme of things, fonts are just not that important (which is of course why I put the Lileks quote in there;-). And Times New Roman is a font that everyone has, so it's a great choice from a useability standpoint.
To preserve the useability and still offer a different font, you could revise your font definition on the stylesheet (if you like serif fonts best) to declare a different font first (which the user's browser would load, it it had it) and then put Times further along in the argument, e.g.,
font-style:palatino,"palatino linotype",Times New Roman, serif;
I actually like your blog's layout and readability, so any changes you make should be to satisfy your own tastes.
When you look at different fonts together on the same page there is quite a bit of difference, or little differences make a big difference or something like that.
Posted by: Lynn S at August 11, 2005 06:58 PM