Oh fonts, when will you not suck?

One of the most painful aspects of being a designer is realizing to what extent how crappy things look outside of Photoshop. Almost as a rule, things look crappier when they are real.

I think the only exception to this is Apple products. I imagine this has something to do with Steve Jobs.

Engineers: Hey, Steve, check it out, it's done.
Steve: WTF. This looks like ass. Make it look like the comp, or your ass is toast.

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Posted 1 year ago

9 comments

Jul 05, 2008
Rebekah said...

They look different in different browsers too! I have Safari on PC and there they look the best. IE looks alright but not Firefox.

Jul 05, 2008
Michele said...

Well then, don't even remotely try to load a website in Opera for linux. I've tried it recently, and some fonts look like 8-bit pictures, hehehe :)

Jul 05, 2008
Rebekah said...

with Safarfi it's like a dream, but my computer isn't all that powerful and it uses a great deal of memory...
 


Take what man makes and use it, but do not worship it...For it shall pass.


--

Jul 05, 2008
Garry Tan said...

Speaking of ugly stuff, the bug where DIV {margin:0px} keeps showing up -- we're about to post a fix for that this afternoon.

The exciting thing about computers is that they double in power every 18 months... so that means good things are coming. I read someplace that In 30 years computers will have more computational power than every human that ever lived. Isn't that crazy!?


But then skynet became self-aware...

Jul 05, 2008
Jane Chin said...

IE 7 made fonts prettier but since I favor FF in general I only open IE7 to look at how my sites look across diff browsers. It would be nice when all fonts can look graceful in pixels.

Jul 06, 2008
Rebekah said...

They improved a little with FireFox 3, but each time I fire up IE or Safari I'm reminded.... Safari, most of all!

Jul 06, 2008
Rick Breslin said...

Setting the font-family style to Helvetica is a decent alternative to Arial, if you want that non-pixelated look to your web text.

Also, if you're interested, here's a little write-up on the evolution of web fonts.

Jul 06, 2008
Rebekah said...

I read about the evolution of web fonts. It was interesting. I'm old [comparatively] so I remember manual type-writers. What an experience it was with the first IBM typewriter with a little «ball» of sorts, so that you could change font!

I don't have Helvetica on my pc. Was going to download it but it costs a great deal of money. The browsers themselves seems to have different ways of handling how they display fonts.
 





Jul 07, 2008

Fonts are definitely better looking on a Mac. The ironic thing for Windows is that Microsoft has been one of the most prolific commissioners of high-quality type for on-screen display – Verdana and Georgia by Matthew Carter, Calibri by Lucas de Groot for Office 2007 and Vista, as well as the whole OpenType initiative – all have been wonderful contributions to typographic excellence for the "new" medium. The problem is that having these fine typefaces display on a Windows machine is like doing Ikebana on a pile of cow dung. What a waste.

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