I’ve written a good bit about fonts in general, and the Vista fonts (the “C” family and Segoe UI) in particular, on these boards and in an article for SP. I’m curious: do you know of anyone besides myself 
who actually uses those fonts in their designs? Have you tried them, or have you seen them on other sites?
Inquiring minds want to know…
Thanks!
Typography is a huge aspect of design, but a much smaller aspect of web design, because you have so much less control, and fewer options.
You mention the difference between serif and sans-serif fonts. It’s generally understood that while serifs can perform a useful function on a printed page, the relatively low resolution of condensing letters into just 12 pixels high means that serifs tend not to work well for body text on the web. Times New Roman is a prime example of this - it wasn’t designed for screen use, and at small sizes it just looks awful. Georgia, on the other hand, was designed to be used at small pixel sizes, and works much better. But in general, I would still stick to a good sans-serif font for body text on the web.
Welcome to SitePoint, Allergonaut. You might consider using Georgia instead of TNR, as it was designed for the Web (TNR is a print font rendered for the Web, and not particularly well). And while browsers support point sizes, they aren’t well rendered; you might consider using pixels or relative sizing with ems instead.
Edit: Stevie, I swear I didn’t see your post when I wrote this one. :wacko:
Looks like the use of these fonts are restricted to only Microsoft Windows/Vista operating systems according to the terms of the license. I am sorry, but you’ll be installing them at your own risk.
Uh, sorry, no thanks. I was ok installing the msttfcorefonts on my Ubuntu, but I’m not going to call the angels of vengeance upon me.
So, the reason I don’t use those fonts isn’t because I’m so worried about whether they’re web safe (since we’ll have a font stack anyway), it’s because of their small size coupled with the fact that I can’t see how that looks.
logic_earth said the size difference can be ok if you design well… however my experience has been that you need to actually view the site in those fonts to find any potential problems. To this day I remember my first, and crappy, dropdown menu which looked fine in the smaller fonts, which I had, but wrapped to a new line if you actually did have Verdana (the first font listed, which I did not have on my system at the time). So all Windows users would have gotten a wrapped dropdown menu and the difference in total width of the menu was somewhere around a few pixels, not much. Had I not SEEN the page in Verdana, I wouldn’t have known. The font size had been set pretty large on the menu (18px-worth) and I didn’t have a solution to regular text-enlargement back then either.
If I’m viewing on Linux fonts and I set my font size to .8em because that’s excellent on the main body text, then throw some tiny thing like Calibri in there, that’s Calibri at .8em, instead of Bitstream Vera. Huge size difference. The difference between someone being able to read the site comfortably and needing to do a few text-enlargments, which, remember, lots of people who need to do that don’t know that they can or how to.
It’s my job to try to figure out what the user needs, know how to provide for those needs, and do my level best to get it done. If I claim to have done a perfect job in anticipating every user’s every need, then I’m deluded and need to back off the caffeine. But it’s equally wrong, in my view, to give a user a minimally styled page that depends on the user (or more likely, the browser) defaults. That is doing the user a disservice.
Does this mean that I know more than the typical user, and am using my knowledge to give him/her things that he doesn’t even know about? Damn right, just like Otto the mechanic knows enough about automobiles to perform repairs that I didn’t even know I needed. I’m glad he knows things I don’t, depend on him to do them for me, and pay him for his knowledge and his intervention.
Taken to the extreme, we’re getting into the worst kind of “crowd-sourced decision making,” where sheer volume outweighs knowledge, artistic taste, and craftsmanship. A majority of users use IE7? Fine, I’ll design strictly for them and the hell with the minority who use Firefox or Opera. A majority of users likes color schemes based on blue? Great, I’ll never use a color scheme based on green or purple.
This is, in a sense, “representative democracy.” I represent the users in my designs. They have veto power, whether it’s with the one(s) who hired me and demand changes in my design, or with the masses, who can show their disapproval of my design by refusing to use my site. But they depend on me to give them a site that’s well-designed and meets their needs, without them needing to have the knowledge to create and implement the design. It’s my job to do it right.
This conversation makes me hark back to an obscure SF book by Jack Vance, called Wyst: Alastor 1716. In the society of the book, everyone works random jobs with no thought to their skills or knowledge, and is switched to a new job every week in order to “maintain egalitarianism” – to prevent someone from becoming “better” than another by actually acquiring any real skill at anything. It’s dysfunctional, of course, and works no better than it would if Otto took my seat at the computer and let me work on some hapless guy’s Chevy. Instead of my decently constructed Web sites and Otto’s well-running Chevy, we’d have badly constructed Web sites and a Chevy that won’t get out of the parking lot. Or maybe I should swap jobs with Heidi the heart surgeon?
Sorry, but I don’t go for this extremist libertarianism. It sounds good on the Perot/Paulista blogs, but it just doesn’t work in the real world.
Originally I saw it on a How-to-install-Vista-fonts-on-Ubuntu, but someone alerted him of the license restrictions so he added that to the bottom of his bloggitty.
The method there involved basically downloading PowerPoint and extracting the fonts from that, so possibly it was in the PP license:
Font Components
You may use the fonts that accompany the PowerPoint Viewer only to display and print content from a device running a Microsoft Windows operating system. Additionally, you may do the following:
You may not copy, install or use the fonts on other devices.
There’s also this PDF (about Vista Home Basic Edition entirely): http://download.microsoft.com/documents/useterms/Windows%20Vista_Ultimate_English_36d0fe99-75e4-4875-8153-889cf5105718.pdf
Where it says, under 3. ADDITIONAL LICENSING REQUIREMENTS AND/OR USE RIGHTS:
b. Font Components. While the software is running, you may use its fonts to display and print
content. You may only
· embed fonts in content as permitted by the embedding restrictions in the fonts; and
· temporarily download them to a printer or other output device to print content.
I did not look to see how this compares to the msttfcorefonts package you can get via Debian… my understanding was that they were still licensed but that people were allowed to install them on any computer for personal use (this may be wrong).
Since I’ve already bothered to keep commercial or paid fonts off my system (so I don’t accidentally use them in the Gimp), I might as well be careful with M$ fonts as well.
Where did you see such a restriction?
Generally it’s depicted through years of research, usability tests and intensive studies and audits (that and following trends, patterns and conventions). You don’t need to be able to read minds to know what may work in the best interests of the most amount of users, you just need factual studies which back up the justification to undertake the activity. Implying you need to be psychic to be able to gauge the optimum way of presenting information on the web is a straw-man argument.
And how do you know what the user’s “best possible experience” might be? Can you read their minds?
I admit that I do get upset when people tell me that they are doing something “for my own good”. I have only the vaguest idea of what actually is “my own good”, but I am arrogant enough to believe that others are even less qualified to decide this for me.
Seriously, why do you think that “putting the users first” involves not specifying a preferred font stack?
I don’t claim to be able to “put the user first” in any really meaningful sense. It appears to me that you are the one who is making the contradictory claims here, not me.
And I never said that we shouldn’t specify a font stack, that’s just another your misunderstandings of what I actually did say, or so it seems to me.
All I did was point out a seeming contradiction in your post. It is still, it seems to me, a contradiction. It annoyed me so I spoke up.
Put up your swords, folks.
Ed, I think he’s got you. Well-crafted font stacks can both serve the designer’s tastes and the majority’s needs; in fact, not only can they, they should do just that. Take the stack in question:
font-family: {
calibri, 'trebuchet ms', arial, sans-serif;
}
According to the stats I’ve seen, about half the Windows users out there have Calibri on their machines. About 15% of Mac users have it, and very few Linux users. So putting it first is appropriate. Those who don’t have it will very likely see the selected text in Trebuchet, and Arial backstops for the ones who don’t have either font. All the bases are covered. (Whether Calibri works well with those particular fonts is another question.)
Making choices for the user in their best interests, and according to our best judgment, is exactly what we do. Otherwise, we’d just post text files and image collections.
(emphasis mine)
Of course, these two sentences quite obviously contradict each other. If you really want what is best for the user then your preferences are irrelevant, aren’t they?
Methinks you have a viable career in politics ahead of you.
I used to take the view that it was better to let users choose their preferred fonts, because I extrapolated my own behaviour to all users. I have long since realised that that isn’t a wise thing to do, because there are lots of people out there who wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to change the default browser font, let alone who would make the effort to do so. And that means that if you don’t give any clue what font to use, a lot of people will see your site in Times New Roman, and that ain’t a good thing.
Choosing a preferred font is an important part of the design process. Just as people can override my preferred layout, colour scheme and text size, they can also override my preferred font choice if they have a burning desire to do so. Design is about making choices. Good design is about making good choices. I set colour schemes knowing that there might be a handful of people for whom that colour scheme won’t work - but overall, I think it is the best design. It’s the same with fonts.
A designer has to say “I know best … but you might know better”. He has to make those decisions about the design, to come up with the complete package that produces the best possible site for the vast majority of people … but at the same time, leave in the flexibility for individuals to override the design choices if they want to.
Methinks you have a viable career in politics ahead of you.
:mad: How dare you…
There’s nothing irrational about making a decision that will be a good one for most people but at the same time recognising that a small proportion of people will have specific needs or preferences that make it a bad decision for those individuals.
Well if that’s the approach you want to take, I have no quarrel. But my advice is that you then don’t pretend to yourself or others that you are putting the user first. You aren’t and the rationalizations I have snipped for the sake of brevity also show that you aren’t. They may well be good rationalizations, even correct ones. But “putting the user first” they are not.
We clearly have different definitions of “putting the user first”. My view of it is that it means coming up with a design that gives the most users the best possible experience. You can’t create a site that gives all users the best possible experience - not in terms of layout, colour scheme, font choice, text size, writing style, vocabulary, content, interactivity or any other aspect of website creation - but you can come up with a design that maximises all of those aspects overall.
If there was any evidence that the majority of web surfers actively chose the font that they really preferred and wanted to read all websites in then I might agree with you. But that simply isn’t the case. When a designer abnegates responsibility for choosing an appropriate font, the result is that a very high proportion of people will see that site in the browser/system default font. How is that serving users better? Seriously, why do you think that “putting the users first” involves not specifying a preferred font stack?
Well you may be right, though I could quarrel, but that wasn’t what I was complaining about. If you think it was then you missed my whole point.
I use fonts that everybody has access to:
{font-family: calibri, ‘trebuchet ms’, arial, sans-serif;}
If they don’t have Calibri, it isn’t as though the text simply disappears! I think Calibri is a nice font, and so where it is available, my site tells the computer to use it. Where it isn’t available, it uses a different font. What’s so wrong with that?
I don’t want a “lowest common denominator” site, I want it to be the best it can be for everyone who is using it. I don’t shy away from Javascript enhancements because some people won’t benefit from them. I don’t eschew illustrative graphics because some people won’t see them. And I don’t avoid using the font I want at the top of the stack because some people won’t have it installed.
I don’t know, I’ve seen some site designs go south with a smaller font like Calibri put into play. What do you do to build your sites flexibly enough to accommodate the differences?
In other words a designer has to be irrational! Sorry, don’t buy it.
He has to make those decisions about the design, to come up with the complete package that produces the best possible site for the vast majority of people … but at the same time, leave in the flexibility for individuals to override the design choices if they want to.
Well if that’s the approach you want to take, I have no quarrel. But my advice is that you then don’t pretend to yourself or others that you are putting the user first. You aren’t and the rationalizations I have snipped for the sake of brevity also show that you aren’t. They may well be good rationalizations, even correct ones. But “putting the user first” they are not.
When you make contradictory claims in public and within a single short messages you shouldn’t be surprised that someone compares you to a politician.
I hear ya. I have a thing for some kind of banana yogurt (something Mrs. Max buys for me regularly). But I don’t want to eat it every day. A little variety, a little change-up, is a good thing. The Web can’t live on Verdana alone.
I would have thought the issue would be to use fonts at least the majority of your users can see, that way neither of those limitations is an issue.
But hey, I never claimed to be a designer, I’m happy with Verdana
I don’t make websites for a living, but I use Corbel on my website, plus Consolas for code. It just struck my fancy the last time I edited the CSS file for it (an irregular event… the entire site only has about 4 pages). But I use Calibri a lot for my work (in powerpoint and word). It just looks very good both on screen and paper.