Just Dropping Some Type Links

I’ve had a bunch of tabs open that just so happen to all be related to typography, so I figured I’d give myself the mental release of closing them by blogging them. How’s that for a blog post format for ya: whatever random tabs you’ve had open for far too long.

• Times New Roman is popular on the web in the sense that it’s a default font installed on most computers and safe to use without having to load any web fonts. But it’s also the default font that (all?) web browsers use if you don’t declare a font-family at all so, in that sense, it sometimes feels like a site is broken on accident when Times is used. Typewolf has a nice list of alternatives if you like the vibe but need something different.
• Speaking of Times, err, The New York Times profiles TypeThursday with a pretty funny correction where they got the typeface name wrong.
• In the last month of 2019, Tyopgraphica published their favorite typefaces of 2018. Fern grabs me.
• Una Kravets has a “designing in the browser” video about typography on the Chrome Developers channel on YouTube. About 11 minutes in, she gets into variable fonts which are just incredible. I know they are capable of all sorts of amazing things (even animation), but I remain the most excited about performance: loading one font and having tons of design control.
• Florens Verschelde’s “A short history of body copy sizes on the Web” gets into how typical font size usage has crept up and up over the years.
• Alina Sava makes the argument that font licensing is ill. Primarily: pricing web fonts based on page views. As someone who works on some high-traffic / fairly-low-profit websites, it’s hard to disagree.
• Matej Latin covers five fonts designed for coding that have ligatures. Ya know, instead of != you get ≠, but only visually rather than actually changing the characters that are used as I did there. Ligatures are a neat trick to use (another trick: ligatures as icons), but Matthew Butterick says “hell no”: The ligature introduces an ambiguity that wasn’t there before. I find it notable that Operator Mono chose not to go there. I feel like I overheard a discussion about it once but can’t dig it up now. I know there is a way to add them, and it’s a little surprising to me that’s legal.
• Trent popped some new fonts on his blog and shared his font shopping list.
• You might have noticed some new fonts around here on CSS-Tricks as well, as of a few weeks ago. I just wanted to freshen up the place as I was getting sick of looking at system fonts (they started looking bad to me on Catalina, which is something Andy Baio pointed out is a Chrome Bug, but still). The CSS-Tricks logo has long been Gotham Rounded, so I went back to Hoefler&Co. for the font choices here to kinda stay in the family. The headers use Ringside, monospace content uses Operator Mono, and the body uses Sentinel.