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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Or you can just assume that distinctive letter shapes are not a problem you need to go out of your way to solve, and move on with your life, right?

I think it's good to remember that there is a species of online person call "the font nerd" (I know because I am one and have font nerd friends), and font nerds would very much like it to be important to select interesting type combinations, and many are not above rationalizing urgencies for that hobby. But I doubt anybody in the real world actually cares. Look at the site we're on!

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A wide variety of people in the real world -- designers, brand designers, accessibility designers, book publishers, teachers, avid readers -- absolutely care about this.

I am often surprised by how much considered opinion non-professionals have about font choices, about readability etc.

The site we're on: I don't think we are going to agree that this is the real world... ;-)

(Ask anyone with dyslexia about typefaces and they can tell you a lot about what they like and don't like. Tell them about typefaces designed with dyslexia in mind and they may love you forever. I totally changed someone's life by introducing her to OpenDyslexic.)

So: professional font nerds care. And there are pathologically bad choices to make that make pages unreadable to people with reading difficulties. I think my argument admits both of those amendments without really bending all that much.

> So: professional font nerds care.

I think I listed a broad enough constituency to rebut that claim. But I would agree that bad font choices (as well as bad colour contrasts) are a significant downside of all the flexibility.

Just because this is fun:

"designers, brand designers, accessibility designers, book publishers" are all professional font nerds.

Teachers and "avid readers" might not be, but I dispute that either of those groups cares as much about font selection as font nerds wish they did.

You sound like an artist and not a professional designer.

I don't know what this means.

Are you saying professional designers don't care about this stuff?

I'm a developer with front-end skills; I've spent a lot of time around professional designers for 27 years and I usually implement people's style guides.

(I'm also a photographer, which should disqualify me from claiming to be an artist)

We could argue for purely functional, utilitarian priorities. But it seems a large fraction of humanity is very susceptible to form over function. Pretending that I think this is testable, I would wager that most people who "care" about fonts in the general population are driven by the same fashion mechanisms as in clothing and other product consumption.

And I don't mean that they have to be aware they are bound like this... many are driven subconsciously by fashion concerns even when they construct other rationalization for their preferences. Humans are intensely social and can turn nearly any kind of visible behavior or marking into a social signal.

A very small number might actually be concerned with actual usability/human factors of fonts, but most are in it for the tribal aspects of associating font usage with other "brand" or tribal identities. For the amateur producers, this can lead to cargo-cult emulation of the producers they admire. Even dissent here can fall into the same trap---consider how many times you've seen a LaTex document from a student who wants to be an author of a computer science paper, but doesn't really have anything to say (yet?)...

Don't get me wrong. As I said, I'm a font nerd. My old blog has fonts I paid actual money for, which was otherwise exchangeable for goods and services in the real world.

I like fonts. I get why people like fonts. I just don't think they matter.

Now, if Computer Modern was an important professional signal, and it was the case that Monotype owned its copyright and rapaciously charged for its use, that would matter quite a bit. But that's not the case; ironically, the one font we can think of that has professional implications is under an open license.

There is a battery of commonly-used fonts (the Microsoft fonts, we might as well call them) that are professionally important. But they're also universally available; they argue against the idea that font licensing is all that meaningful, as well.

The average person may not notice but they are being influenced. Fonts convey meaning and emotion like a picture.

I disagree with your implication that this is really meaningful.

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