Comment by gkoberger

Comment by gkoberger a day ago

19 replies

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No, I think we're just looking at it from different perspectives.

Yes, most people are fine choosing from the fonts available on their computer when writing a document.

But that's not what me nor OP are talking about. We're talking about shipping software (like a mobile app), or publishing a blog post. In that case, the best you can specify is either a very common font (Helvetica, etc), or a high-level classification (serif, sans-serif, etc).

There are many free fonts out there, yes, but there's a reason they're free. The quality for a majority of them is significantly lower, and many designs come with constraints (either utilitarian or stylistic). You don't have to agree, but I'm not being absurd or lacking sincerity.

You're also just going around and commenting the same thing on each of my posts. But don't limit your understand to just my writing here; there's thousands of books about the importance of typography if you're curious to learn more.

wubrr a day ago

> There are many free fonts out there, yes, but there's a reason they're free.

Go on and tell me what that reason is then. Are you also going to tell me free open-source software, like Linux is low-quality because its free?

> The quality for a majority of them is significantly lower

Again, a completely baseless, unprovable assertion.

> You don't have to agree, but I'm not being absurd or lacking sincerity.

What do you call your example of using Calibri for everything in response to someone suggesting the use of free fonts?

You are lacking sincerity and making absurd claims. Almost everything else you say is literally baseless rhetoric that you are unable to back up with data or any objective argument.

> there's thousands of books about the importance of typography if you're curious to learn more.

It's amazing that you apparently know of thousands of such books, but are unable to make one coherent, objective argument to back up your claims.... did you read them?

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  • rondini a day ago

    You’ve been combative throughout this thread, and it's clear that you don’t see typography or design as disciplines that warrant serious thought. I don't think you're actually willing to engage with an explanation of why it matters but I'll try anyway.

    System fonts are the absolute bottom of the barrel. Some are well designed but using any of them is a visual shorthand that you didn't care enough to put thought into your design. You're associating your product with the ocean of amateur work on the internet, giving the impression you copy pasted a template.

    There are some high quality free fonts typically backed by massive organizations with actual typographic expertise. Most free fonts however, are amateur work that are technically and functionally lacking. Professional fonts are well designed at all weights, they're carefully spaced, they include much larger character sets to support more languages, contain features like lining and non-lining figures, variable font weights, small caps... are those all slight differences?

    There’s a reason so many articles exist with titles like “Google Fonts That Don’t Suck”. Most of them do. If you are a professional whose job requires working with type, then choosing a font is foundational to your product. Arguing that all design is BS is just lazy; it's not a coherent argument.

    I highly recommend practicaltypography.com, a free web book that discusses all of this and more, including why system fonts are bad and why a professional typeface is worth paying for.

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    • tptacek a day ago

      This claim that system fonts are the "bottom of the barrel" is just so clearly false that I don't understand how you can be an advocate of typography and say it. Both Microsoft and Apple put huge amounts of effort into typography, contract or employ well-regarded designers, and their outputs are themselves well-regarded.

      If you wanted to say "most of what's on Google Fonts is bottom of the barrel", you'd have a colorable argument. But that isn't what you said.

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      • dwaite a day ago

        San Francisco is a great font. Arial is a perfectly functional semi-clone of Helvetica, Times New Roman is a decent interpretation of Plantin. Roboto is an interesting mash-up of Helvetica, DIN, and a few others.

        System font from a web standpoint means you get one of these depending on the user's choice of phone, desktop, and/or browser.

        It is somewhat like buying art because the frame covers a blemish on the wall. That the print inside the frame might be of a famous impressionist painting does not mean that the frame or the print necessarily go with the room.

        The car analogy involves a car rental place - that they may give you any one of several newish, functional and even stylish vehicles does not change that you may often wind up being paired with a vehicle mismatched for your function.

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        • tptacek 18 hours ago

          Around the time Matthew Carter was creating Georgia, one of the most widely-used system fonts in the world, for Microsoft, he was also widely considered one of the best typographers in the world. Georgia is not hotel room wall art.

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    • dcow a day ago

      There are many laughably horrible attempts at fonts out there on free font sites (I remember my days learning to write software in the early 00s), sure. But there are also high quality professionally designed and typeset fonts available for free, including those of the system variety. The argument is comparing the latter to expensive designer fonts, not the former to high quality fonts.

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    • wubrr a day ago

      > You’ve been combative throughout this thread

      Disagreeing with you doesn't mean I'm combative. (Not that I care)

      > typography or design as disciplines that warrant serious thought.

      We are talking about fonts here, more specifically fonts used in software, more specifically the quality of free fonts used in software. Not 'design' as a whole which is much more than that.

      > System fonts are the absolute bottom of the barrel.

      If you say so.

      > You're associating your product with the ocean of amateur work on the internet, giving the impression you copy pasted a template.

      Reusing a font means you're copy-pasting your article/app/etc from a template? Erm ok.

      > There are some high quality free fonts typically backed by massive organizations with actual typographic expertise.

      'Some'? Like 1000? 10000? How many fonts does one application need? 'typically'? How 'typically'? And I'm not being pedantic - your statements are pretty meaningless without actual numbers.

      > Professional fonts are well designed at all weights, they're carefully spaced, they include much larger character sets to support more languages, contain features like lining and non-lining figures, variable font weights, small caps... are those all slight differences?

      What is a 'Professional font'? lmao

      Plenty of free fonts have all of the features you've listed, and plenty of non-free fonts don't.

      > There’s a reason so many articles exist with titles like “Google Fonts That Don’t Suck”. Most of them do.

      Again 'so many' and 'most'... you should provide specific (at least approximate) numbers, otherwise this says nothing about how many good free fonts are actually out there.

      > Arguing that all design is BS is just lazy

      Well I didn't say that, pretending that I did is pretty lazy tho.

      > I highly recommend practicaltypography.com, a free web book that discusses all of this and more, including why system fonts are bad and why a professional typeface is worth paying for.

      Oh geez! A FREE book which tells you why you should pay for 'professional' fonts while at the same time selling them to you with affiliate links! Thank you sir!

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      • tptacek a day ago

        You should care if you're being combatative, but, even more importantly, quoting previous comments the way you're doing doesn't work well on HN and is also a flamewar trope. Everybody can read the comments you're responding to. Just refer back to them in prose. A single quote, maybe 2 in a long comment, fine, but what you're doing now creates the impression that you're sort of rebutting what the previous commenter said as you read them, sentence by sentence, which is a tell that you're not actually thinking about what they said.

        Also: they're pretty clearly wrong, so you shouldn't need any of this to refute them.

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  • gkoberger a day ago

    I'm not going to argue with you, but I just want to point out that the person I was responding to specifically used the phrase "system supported fonts". That's why I mentioned Calibri.

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    • wubrr a day ago

      No, what the person you responded to said was:

      > '..freely available and/or system supported fonts.'

      Not just 'system supported fonts' (whatever that means), and not just Calibri. That's why your 'use Calibri for everything' example is absurd and does not at all address the point they made.

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  • michaelmrose a day ago

    The last sentence is the variety that is super tempting to make but counterproductive because it shuts down discussion or poisons it thereafter its made to impress bystanders not actually communicate with the person.

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    • wubrr a day ago

      Agree that it might not be the best, but seems like a fairly appropriate response for someone trying to back up their rhetoric with 'thousands of books out there'. How is it 'made to impress bystanders'?

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      • tptacek a day ago

        Who cares? They're part of a line of argumentation that dunks on the typography work of Matthew Carter. This is very much the same thing as a thread on industrial design dunking on Dieter Rams. You don't get angry at that kind of argument; you laugh at it.

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        • wubrr a day ago

          Oh I was never angry, I was enjoying the argument (maybe that makes me combative, oh well), and I was completely open to being proven wrong and thereby becoming more informed on the topic... alas...

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II2II a day ago

Something tells me that some designers care about fonts a heck of a lot more than most consumers do. As a consumer, I care about legibility above all else. There are plenty of metrics that affect that, but many of the freely available (albeit, not necessarily free) fonts are perfectly fine on that front. More bluntly, some of those freely available fonts are going to be better than the vast majority of fonts that you can pay for because: (a) companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have invested in their development or licensing to ensure their customers have access to high quality fonts with coverage for most languages; and (b) they have wide availability, since font substitution is going to have a much larger impact upon the perceived quality of a document than its use of quality fonts.

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joquarky 20 hours ago

Maybe this pedantic snobbery will matter again when we switch back to creative mode, but it all seems highly elitist right now while many are trying to just survive.

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