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Comment by mfsch | Hacker News Reader

Your argument can be extended to most of website design. The identity of a design and the impact on accessibility are two factors that constantly have to be weighted against each other in web design. Do you choose a slightly gray text color which improves the overall appearance of the text but reduces the contrast? Do you include images? There are hundreds of excellent text fonts out there and the more you work with them, the more you realize that they do have different characteristics other than the serif/non-serif distinction. Only a handful of fonts are installed on most computers, so the decision becomes: Do you choose a font that doesn’t really fit the design in order to safe a moment when loading the page or do you go with a web font and optimize the loading procedure (CDN…) and get a coherent design? Can you express more of the visual identity by removing an image and including a web font instead?

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>Your argument can be extended to most of website design.

Certainly, as it should be.

>Do you choose a slightly gray text color which improves the overall appearance of the text but reduces the contrast

No, you do not. Good example.

>Do you include images?

Including images does not make the site inaccessible. Bad example.

>Can you express more of the visual identity by removing an image and including a web font instead?

We're talking about the primary textual content of the site. Not a header, or a menu item, or a title. Very few people are crazy enough to render the entire text of their site as an image.

>No, you do not. Good example.

This. This is the reason people are reacting poorly to what you're saying. Pretending that a sweeping statement like that can cover every possible website is _absurd_. The same goes for webfonts.

The question you're answering was not meant to be answered by you. It has to be weighed by each site designer. Saying otherwise is offensive to the people who take the time to answer those kind of questions differently for each project they work on.

>This is the reason people are reacting poorly to what you're saying

I didn't see anyone react poorly. There is nothing bad about polite disagreement. I enjoy hearing other people's views, and having them try to convince me of the merits of their views.

>Pretending that a sweeping statement like that can cover every possible website is _absurd_

I obviously disagree. Can you give me an example of where deliberately choosing to make your website harder to read is a good choice? And that would be considered good web design?

The point is, in web design there are a lot of different aspects that have to be balanced. One of them is accessibility & speed, an other one is visual design and identity. The choice of a web font over one of the ~6 standard fonts affects both of these and there is a choice to make.

This choice can be: I use a web font because this allows me to convey 80% of my visual identity with the text, I can put the text (and content) as the central element of the page and include no images on the page except for a small logo, leading to a fast loading page. For this, I accept that the user has to wait a little bit until the text is displayed when he/she visits the page the first time and the font isn’t cached yet. On a decent internet connection this might not be noticeable but on a bad 3G connection it might take the page load from 4s to 6s. Do the benefits outweigh the risks/disadvantages?

I do agree though that this decision is often not made consciously and a lot of times a web font is slapped upon a site just because we can. Way too often, visual designers create pictures of websites in Photoshop with no idea about the implications. On the other hand, I have seen that the rise of web fonts has made designers shift away from creating designs that are basically a frame with the visual identity where they slap in some random content. A lot of sites now treat the content as the main element of the site, reducing all other elements to a minimum. I would argue that this change greatly improves the quality of web sites and that the rise of web fonts is one of the main drivers of this change.

>use a web font because this allows me to convey 80% of my visual identity with the text

You lost me here. You convey absolutely no visual identity like that. People are reading the text, it is not window dressing. I'm sure marketing would be shocked to hear they don't need to worry about logos or colours or branding any more, because they can convey 80% of their identity just by using a font where the a has a 1% longer tail.

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