The full quote reads “Neuton is a clean, dark, somewhat Dutch-inspired serif font which reminds you a little of Times.” I just now stripped the old serif/sans choice out of my blog (less marginalia!) and dropped in Neuton for all the body text.
[Update: Neuton, we hardly knew ye. It’s gonzo, replaced by FF Tisa Web Pro.]
[Update: I have verified that Neuton has horribly-malformed lower-case t’s on Windows, both XP and Win7, both IE and Firefox. Blecch.]
[Update: There was a horrible editing error that caused severe breakage in the HTML header. I have no idea how it ever worked. Fixed, I think.]
Using a Google web font is just as simple as they claim. I haven’t noticed a slowdown in the page load but I haven’t tested yet on a slow network.
This follows some weeks of paradox-of-choice paralysis; there are just too many typefaces there that tickle my eye. So I sucked it up and pulled the trigger. I can always change my mind later.
I have two next-steps in mind. First, to find another pretty face for the headers. Second, to go poke around Typekit, drop a few bucks, and adopt one of the high-gloss classics.
I had been rendering the body text in Georgia at 0.95em. Neuton really didn’t seem happy at anything less than a full 1.0em, which required a bunch of irritating little adjustments to margins and line-heights all over the page.
In conclusion: First of all, thanks and goodbye to Georgia, which has served me well for years and remains a damn fine all-purpose Web serif choice. Second, thanks to Brian Zick for Neuton.
And finally, all this is mostly irrelevant, since almost everyone who reads this blog is, like you, reading it in whatever some feed reader thinks will make it look good, not the way I set it up.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Peter (Jul 16 2011, at 01:44)
Neuton looks very impressive on my Mac !
In your search for a compatible header font you may want to try : http://font-combinator.com/ which has Neuton and an extensive selection of other fonts
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From: zdeslav (Jul 16 2011, at 01:54)
hi Tim,
well, I guess I'm one of those strange people who need to open the page from the feed reader, if they find the article interesting.
I am reading this from FF 3.6 / Ubuntu 10.10 and the page seems messed up:
- none of the links in the article work
- links in the sidebar seem OK
- when I try to select text, I get big orange block with only a few letters shown
- bottom horizontal rule and +1 button are not positioned correctly: they overlap the last paragraph
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From: GiacomoL (Jul 16 2011, at 03:41)
The slowdown is significant on 3g/phone connections, at one point i was wondering whether the page would render at all. Layout is fine tho, and the font does look better than Georgia (iphone4 / safari).
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From: Gavin B. (Jul 16 2011, at 04:44)
Neuton quite ugly on this Windows box, FFx5, cleartype LCD.
For example in the word "remains" the space between the re and the mains look really uncool.
Is suppose you've already considered Gentium
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=gentium
which was design with the whole world and many scales in mind.
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From: Ed Davies (Jul 16 2011, at 05:18)
I see exactly the same zdeslav on the same combination of software so it's not something odd about his/her/its system.
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From: Rick Moynihan (Jul 16 2011, at 05:20)
I can confirm the same (or similar) rendering glitches as the other commenter in Firefox 5.0 on Ubuntu 11.04.
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From: al (Jul 16 2011, at 06:41)
Also came from RSS to check out the font. Sorry to say that I don't care much for it, and that's not in comparison to Georgia or whatever you had before.
On my Mac, it looks overall dark, but the individual letters seem oddly inconsistent in weight. It looks dark but ok from a distance, but up close enough to read, it seemed distracting.
Sorry for the vague explication, I'm not a font guy, just trying to get across what I felt...
BTW, on your comments page, "(All fields except “web” are required.)" is a little over the top since besides the comment field, that leaves only the name field... ;o)
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From: Paul Boddie (Jul 16 2011, at 06:59)
I have similar problems to zdeslav, also in Firefox 3.6. However, when they write "none of the links in the article work", I find that the links are present but displaced upwards by a few lines (more at the top of the page than at the bottom); this makes it impossible to select the top item on the front page of your blog without switching styles off.
When I try to select text, the correspondence between the region I actually select and the result is also affected by the vertical displacement. Also, on the front page, the text is double-spaced - maybe you intended to do that - but this results in the selection of text on a line defining quite a tall region for the selection.
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From: Jim Harvie (Jul 16 2011, at 08:32)
I am sadly one of those who is oblivious on a consious level to these things, but no doubt influenced on some strange emotional one with it done right, and done wrong. So though I can voice no opinion other than yay or nay (I yayed) I appreciate the effort.
Being near Guelph I mentioned your name to a young pup recently. He said you should be good at this internet thing, you invented some of it.
I did not know whether to kiss him or hit him.
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From: stand (Jul 16 2011, at 08:58)
I have the same issues as zdeslav. Firefox 3.6/Ubuntu 10.10. Looks fine in Chrome and Opera.
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From: Eric H (Jul 16 2011, at 09:59)
Sez you: "everyone who reads this blog is, like you, reading it in whatever some feed reader thinks will make it look good, not the way I set it up"
No offense, but: thank God for that.
OK, OK, _your_ blog looks good; you actually care about design.
But most web pages are so hideous that I simply wouldn't read them if that required that I be directly exposed to them.
The feed reader throws out all the visual clutter, thereby making them readable.
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From: John Cowan (Jul 16 2011, at 11:18)
It looks very 19th-century clunky. (Chrome, Windows 7).
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From: ebenezer (Jul 16 2011, at 13:17)
...except that they're *not* like me, because I am using Chrome's userScriptCSS extension to apply John Holdun's Re-Reader CSS (http://johnholdun.com/re-reader/) — with some modifications — to Google Reader. I get to see it in the way that *I* think will make it look good.
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From: sporobolus (Jul 16 2011, at 19:24)
i read in NetNewsWire, but once i link from the feed to the article it renders the page pretty much the same as Safari, however it applies a minimum font size, for which i'm thankful in this case
the type in Safari is really dense and small, like blurry newsprint; bumped it up a couple of zoom text clicks and it became readable, but still looks really heavy and honestly unattractive; on my iPhone, surprisingly, it's renders with a lot less weight and is much more attractive and readable, but that's not where i read this blog
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From: Jake (Jul 16 2011, at 20:16)
"So I sucked it up and pulled the trigger. I can always change my mind later."
You could create a font randomizer script. Then fill it up with all your favorites, and let it switch fonts on the fly. Every time you look at your blog you get a different font, all your favorites! :)
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