Serif is best. Text in serif is more easy on the eyes and more aesthetically appealing. Sans looks cludgy and messy. The spacing of sans fonts is bizarre. In blocks of text like paragraphs it is more work for the eyeballs and the brain to take in the words.
This goes against what I’m reading on multiple sites advising on use of web fonts, but I disagree. Look at nytimes.com, arguably one of the best designed sites on the Internet (best designed, but not best content. nytimes is far-too steeped in Operation Mockingbird-type mind-control crap to be even close to the best).
One of the articles said that formerly when screen resolutions were much lower than today, that sans-serif fonts looked better. That may well be the case back in the time of early PC’s and Mac’s.
I did word-processing for years on computers with low-res monitors and I think sans fonts like Helvetica and Arial did look better. They looked clean and neat back when displays used VGA resolution or lower. Such resolutions were so grainy and pixels so large that havng the serifs adorning the fonts only made them look worse.
I also used to like the printed look of sans on a resume. A resume though has to consider other aspects of presentation which may actually outweigh readability. A person creates a resume with a certain style objective.
Of course there is a style objective to a site like nytimes.com but ultimately readability is the most important thing for those who consume information.
I find that many sites which use sans fonts look really, really ugly. The sans font does not do anything to impart a clean, neat style. Rather, it just makes the site look cludgy.
Getting fonts to look right is a major thing with computers and the Internet. I just spent a long time struggling with fonts on a new system I set up. In Firefox I could not find a set of settings under the advanced fonts setup which worked with all sites.
When the font settings would look just right on some sites, on others they would be horrible. I would then tweak the settings and then another site would look good, but the original one looked horrible.
I did finally manage to deal with the issue by installing an addon called Default FullZoom Level.
It allows one, as the name says, to set the default zoom level for web pages.
About this Add-on
1.This extension can change Default FullZoom Level.
This extension is useful in the case of a high-definition display.
Sites that look good with serif fonts:
New York Times
Los Angeles Times
Alaya.net 🙂
Sites which are difficult to read and ugly because of sans fonts:
Wikipedia
SFGate
Mercury News
Slashdot
ScienceDaily
BBC News
Sites which get by with sans fonts because they are not reading sites:
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.