Here at waffle, besides currently helping free Burma, we are dedicated to campaigning against the abominations of the world in general. Today, we can’t help but point out that a dear friend of the site, the Daring Fireball, has defected to the dark side of typography after years of successful commentary and practice.
We’re talking about the adoption of the Gill Sans typeface for subheads, sidebar links, Linked List date lines and headings. Gill Sans – widely regarded as the drunk uncle of Futura – simply looks wrong and flies in the face of the tradition of excellent typography at the DF HQ.
We here at waffle are hoping that the effects of the blunt strike that we can deduce Gruber received to his head in order to have made such an absurd change will soon subside, and that the trustworthy Verdana (and Georgia for the headings), while not in the absolute elite of sans-serifs and serifs respectively, will be reinstated once again as symbols of a return to the fair side.
“ We here at waffle are hoping that the effects of the blunt strike to the head that we can deduce Gruber received to his head in order to have made such an absurd change” … to his head?
By Ahruman · 2007.10.03 16:35
Whoops. A bit too heady.
By Jesper · 2007.10.03 17:32
This from a guy whose site mixes Helvetica with Lucida Grande.
By http://openid.aol.com/gruberx · 2007.10.03 18:08
The thing is that Helvetica and Lucida Grande are both good fonts.
By Jesper · 2007.10.03 18:09
I have to disagree with one of the core sentiments in this post: That Daring Fireball was practicing good typography use prior to this change.
Setting your site in Verdana size 11px is not good typography. I’ve often complained that with displays growing larger and larger, it’s time we moved on from 11px as the default font size for websites, especially when it’s a site that’s all text.
Also, seriously, Verdana? Ugh.
By Garrett Murray · 2007.10.03 18:50
Verdana is noteworthy for three reasons; it’s a perfectly reasonable font (if horribly overused); it’s made by Matthew Carter, a respected type designer; and it’s been extensively hinted to work well on screen. (Which is why it tends to look like crap on Linux; the Freetype library can’t allow the font’s hinting to be on by default because of ridiculous patents held by Apple on reading the hinting data and applying it.)
Gruber has said recently that the real reason Verdana 11px is the default is because it looked and worked swimmingly on OS 9 – and I agree. But I also agree that some change would be nice, and that “it’s now the second half of the ’00s” is a good reason.
(11px, by the way, is configurable under the Site Preferences link on Daring Fireball, and any good browser allows you to scale up and down pixel fonts. But you know this already.)
By Jesper · 2007.10.03 20:45
When I saw it today, I actually deleted my font caches because I thought something was wrong. “There’s no way Gruber would change that…”
By http://openid.aol.com/adbmice · 2007.10.03 21:52