Comment by strenholme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by strenholme | Hacker News Reader

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I can’t speak for the parent poster, but, yes, back in the Myspace days, end users would do really tasteless CSS like Comic Sans or an italic font everywhere. Back then, I told my browser “I don’t care what font they tell you to use, just render it with Verdana”.

These days, people either use their social network’s unchangeable CSS, or they use a Wordpress theme with an attractive and perfectly readable font. Even Merriweather, which I personally don’t care for, is easy enough to read.

The only time I have seen a page use obnoxious fonts in the 2010s is when the LibreSSL webpage used Comic Sans as a joke to highlight that the project could use more money:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140422115234/http://www.libres...

Edit It may be a case that the parent poster likes using a delta hinted font, either Verdana or Georgia, on a low resolution monitor, and doesn’t like the blurry look of an anti-aliased font on a 75dpi screen.

> back in the Myspace days, end users would do really tasteless CSS like Comic Sans or an italic font everywhere.

Indeed, typography is a skill. Most designers should have it though, which is why I asked more information to OP.

> The only time I have seen a page use obnoxious fonts in the 2010s is when the LibreSSL webpage used Comic Sans as a joke to highlight that the project could use more money

Ah, the infamous Comic Sans. It's a shame because as a typeface on its own, in its category, it is pretty good. Sadly, it's misused all the time in contexts where it's not appropriate at all.

> It may be a case that the parent poster likes using a delta hinted font, either Verdana or Georgia, on a low resolution monitor, and doesn’t like the blurry look of an anti-aliased font on a 75dpi screen.

Without more details we cannot guess. You're right: a lot of things can go wrong and ruin a typeface, regardless of how the characters are designed. Anti-protip: a reliable way to make any font look like shit is to keep the character drawings as they are and mess up the tracking (letter-spacing) and kerning.

I think one of the reasons Comic Sans got such a bad rep is because it was one of the relatively few available fonts back in the pre-woff “web safe fonts” era of a decade ago. Microsoft should had given us a more general purpose font, such as a nice looking slab serif to fill the gap between the somewhat old-fashioned looking Georgia and the very stylized Trebuchet MS font.

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