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.
9 comments
They look different in different browsers too! I have Safari on PC and there they look the best. IE looks alright but not Firefox.
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 :)
Take what man makes and use it, but do not worship it...For it shall pass.
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...
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.
They improved a little with FireFox 3, but each time I fire up IE or Safari I'm reminded.... Safari, most of all!
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.
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.
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.
Leave a comment...
