Although I spent the better part of this weekend in Ayer, Massachusetts participating in a family-run 5k, I managed to squeeze some development time on my upcoming WordPress theme.
While the main goal was to facilitate search and encourage stickiness, I’ve decided that this theme is a nice time to stray away from my previously rigid “font-family: ‘helvetica neue,’ helvetica, arial, sans-serif;.” As it stands right now, I’ve got sans-serifs as the body text, and mostly serifs as the headings/titles. The problem is that I rarely use serifs. So rarely, that I’m not even familiar with their list of “readily available” typefaces to the online community. So now I come to ask you, “what do you use?” Sure I could google it, but I’d rather hear your tips, tricks, and opinions. Also, I’d like to avoid sIFR if possible.
Inspiration:
- Coudal’s Seed Conference (not for semantic or code purposes. Purely presentation)
- Jon Tangerine. That logo? Not an image.
- I Love Typography ‘cept not so honkingly huge.
How do you feel about mixed type? Are big sizes dead? How small is too small?
Georgia works really well.. is completely compatible and looks pretty good.
I am like you, I don’t use serif very much. I do enjoy its use though and I like the look you can achieve with just something as simple as mixing Georgia and Verdana.
We’ve done a fair bit of Sifr stuff - as it is usually the easiest way to appease the client - however I find it a pain to work with and run into glitches with it when used in conjunction with other flash elements.
Most of the time though, I run into problems when using just serifs instead of the particular font used in a customers literature, or design comp(if we didn’t do it.) Most of the time, they will catch that the font is not exactly the same as in their printed pieces, or logo… etc.. and will demand that it look “identical” - Because of this we’ve used sifr quite a bit. I’d love to just use some natural fonts instead, but you know the adage, the client gets what they want..
thanks for the killer advice, todd. I’ve switched all my serif’s primary font to georgia, and things look 10x better.
someone asked me why I didn’t want to use sIFR, and it’s not because I don’t have great respect for the tool. I just like to avoid using flash and plugin based stuff if I can avoid it. The new design relies heavily on JS and CSS techniques not supported by IE, so I’m trying to stay as accessible as possible at this point.
I can’t wait till CSS embedded fonts are supported my widely. At this point, its pretty much a novelty like text-shadow and CSS animations.
This might be a stupid question, but there needs to be room for those as well:
Is Georgia “web-safe”? Can I depend on my Windows-driven visitors also having it installed? I really dig Georgia the most of all serif-based types, but have been wondering about this lately…
According to wikipedia (which we all know is infallible), Microsoft’s official web safe fonts -provided on all default installations- includes but is not limited to:
“Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Times New Roman, Verdana, Trebuchet MS (more recently) and Lucida Sans (to some extent).”
I like to think Mac people have those and more. Dunno if there is an official answer there. Plus, do you just count a-grade browsers? linux? where do you stop?
I just check in Safari, and if everything looks nice, I go for it
But thanks anyway; I’ll be using Georgia some more from now on!
I’m really not that skilled as a web designer, and I like to think that most people just read my feed instead. Then the problem is solved as easy as 1-2-Google Reader.
Here’s a nice tool to compare fonts and various sizes. http://typetester.maratz.com/
Georgia is really the only nice safe serif typeface in my opinion.