Great summary Max! Very concise. In particular the statement about the fact
serif and sans-serif were never sufficient. You saved me a lot of writing!
:)
On 5 Mar 2014 06:51, "Max" <max(a)koehler-kn.de> wrote:
Hey Isarra, that's some good questions.
I'll try to answer as concise as possible, but in case you're interested,
here's the detailed version:
https://gist.github.com/awesomephant/9352699
*> Why would this be the best experience?*
In our case, a good experience means being able to *read stuff* and
understand the content as easy as possible. Therefore, a typographic setup
that makes reading as easy as possible makes for a good experience.
*> But why would we, for an interface for an online encyclopedia and
similar, need something so specific at all?*
Our goal is to help people get information they need by *reading articles*.
It makes sense to make reading an article as easy as possible, because
ultimately that will help people understand the content. The typeface is an
important part of good typography and should be chosen carefully, even
though there's other factors such as spacing and size that need to be
considered.
*> If there is a very specific 'right font', why aren't we using it as a
webfont?*
I think webfonts are amazing, and we should definitely use them. However,
even with webfonts using a font stack is a good idea. What if the user has
an old browser that doesn't support webfonts? What if the user chose not to
download font files to save bandwidth? In those cases we still want to do
our best to ensure a decent reading experience, which isn't always possible
with the default fallbacks.
Our font stack would look something like this:
'Fancy pants Webfont Pro', DejaVu Sans, Arial, sans-serif;
*> Why did the generic 'serif' and 'sans-serif' become insufficient?*
They were in fact never sufficient. But for quite some time, web
technology didn't allow us to do it better. Now that it does (with webfonts
and finer typographic control), why shouldn't we go ahead and improve our
user experience?
Hope that answered your questions, feel free to hit me up if something
isn't clear.
Best, max.
@awesomephant
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