Turning to more cycling-focused things for Fall.

A Word on Type on This Site

Mar 03 2008

As designers become increasingly frustrated with typography on the web, the decision to default to type that most have on their computers or pick a dynamic text replacement method such as SIFR or using PHP is one we fuss over.

This is one issue that plagues me — the choice to use dynamic text replacement or what a user has. I originally intended this site to make use of SIFR but decided against it in the end due to the recent redesign I did of the peripheral blogs (as we call them internally) at Gapers Block. We purchased Archer specifically for this redesign (there are four in all, accessed from the navigation at the very top) and wanted to make full use of it.

However, when the redesign launched, staffers asked about the flash of unstyled content that happened as the headlines got replaced down the page. On a Mac, this is very noticeable and even I was getting a bit irked by it. We have plans to change that, at least for the entry titles, keeping the feature title in SIFR.

And my original plan to use SIFR for this site, evaporated. Instead, I’ve decided to use just plain old CSS and stagger the type depending on what you have. So, if you’re a designer, you may likely have Clarendon and will therefore see the titles for each entry and other parts of the site (like the Archives) styled as so. My next type choice is Lucida Fax, a font I actually quite like on the web. It’s on most operating systems but not all. After that is Georgia and then whatever generic serif default your browser/OS decides on.

For me, this was the best decision, despite this being a personal site. SIFR, in small doses works wonderfully but on a large scale site with multiple headlines or instances of replacement, I find it unacceptable. An audience, unsavvy with such things will ask questions and consider it a bug. This is a bit odd. For this site, I just wanted fast and smooth. No extra overhead and so on. And so it is.

Notes (9)


Posted in

Design, Small Thoughts, Television


9 Notes

Mar 03 2008
10:34pm

Winnie Lim

I had this approach for my own site as well, I decided on using common web fonts and see how I can make the best of it. It was like a personal challenge. I wish firefox in windows has anti-aliasing for fonts though.


Mar 04 2008
07:03am

Naz Hamid

Winnie – indeed. Have you turned on ClearType for Windows to get anti-aliasing?


Mar 04 2008
09:43am

Al Stevens

Have you tried experimenting with the placement of the sifr setup function calls? Maybe (although semantically this is far from ideal) you could try placing them directly in the footer (before the calls to foodbuzz). I don’t know for sure, but you may find that getting them in before the tracking javascript could erradicate your problem. Sometimes if your tracking/ad serving website takes a while to respond this will stop the dom loading completely – therefore stopping sifr from firing until the ad serving/tracking website has done what is needed. (If the ad serving site fails to resopnd this can cause real problems)

Either by re-writing the code for ds.foodbuzz.com to execute on dom load like sifr, or by moving the sifr functions directly into the body before these calls could fix your problem.

I have had to re-write calls to google analytics for similar reasons as failure of google to respond would cause all our dom scripts to stop working


Mar 04 2008
12:33pm

Winnie Lim

Am using a mac actually, while I can turn on ClearType to see how it looks like when am doing testing, its not within my control for the rest of my users – which is a little tragic because it makes quite a bit of difference, and being a pro-standards designer, a lot of my users are Windows firefox users. Wonder what is stopping the Mozilla people from providing it within the client though, IE 7 does anti-aliasing pretty well, though not as well as on the mac. ;p

Better font support is on the top of my wishlist, be it from within the browser or if it’s a new css spec. :)


Mar 04 2008
03:08pm

Naz Hamid

Hi Al – I haven’t but that shows some promise — I can’t mess with Foodbuzz, as they are an advertiser and the logo is served offsite — and will investigate soon.

Winnie – Ah, gotcha. It’s certainly one of the things I’d love to see. But I’m not sure if mostly, more PC users need to use ClearType or a combination of that and IE at least, rendering type at a proper size.


Mar 05 2008
10:50am

glass

I activated Clarendon, just for you.


Mar 05 2008
02:37pm

Naz Hamid

Chris — The shame! How could you not have had Clarendon activated all this time? ;)


Mar 06 2008
05:32pm

Josh

I must have it activated to, as its showing up for me. Hooray.


Mar 15 2008
07:23am

Victor

Didn’t have Clarendon activated but activated it only to notice that the title of this article had changed to “A W ord on Type on This Site”. Great!

You might want to spell georgia with first letter in uppercase in the title because for some reason my browser ignores it and goes with the next, which is helvetica, dont know if thats the reason but it use georgia in the body where its spelled with uppercase G. No biggie but as you brought my attention to these small details I thought I’d just let you know.



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