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Comment by tga | Hacker News Reader

Since we are on this topic, I have a public service announcement: even though light Open Sans looks great and is trendy for headings, using a light font weight for body text is a bad idea because it makes it difficult to read. I keep coming across examples on the web, always with bad results.

Thank you.

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The type looks fine to me, and and reads very comfortably – better than the original type choice actually. Here are some screenshots on OSX:

Firefox 22.0a2 (2013-04-22) http://i.imgur.com/7o0fmL9.png

Chrome 26.0.1410.65 http://i.imgur.com/f9kqILy.png

Safari 6.0.4 http://i.imgur.com/PYAxOkw.png

I can't speak for Windows and Linux though. Do you have ClearType turned on?

I think I wasn't clear enough on what I meant.

Open Sans itself is a nice font, I have nothing against it. As a web font it might get rendered improperly, but that is an issue with the browser and the platform.

What I was talking about -- unlike, say, Arial, Open Sans also has a light weight (font-weight: 300) variant. That is now popular with large headings BUT I do not find it at all readable as body text (in Open Sans or most other fonts). Wordpress.com is a good example, as they do NOT make this mistake.

Are you on XP by any chance? It’s got horrible rendering for light fonts in my experience.

Make sure you have ClearType turned on.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306527

It doesn't matter. Any font deliberately set lighter then normal is hard to read on any device.

I'm by no means any sort of designer, but on their comparison picture the Open Sans body is easier for me to read than the Helvetica/Ariel body.

I came into say exactly this.

Crying shame that the world's most popular blog platform thoughtlessly made this color mistake, and now this problem is going to become common-place.

Not everyone on earth has 20/20 vision and uses an Apple Retina device. Is it possible to block all WP sites so my browsing world is less miserable?

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