That's why we love Arc90's Readability http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ No longer do we have to care what ugly fonts or color schemes people use when posting blog articles.
It’s not a technical problem. Safari on OS X renders the font great, it’s crisp and it looks just like Museo should look at the size you picked for the body text.
It’s a design problem. Museo is a fine font, great when compared to other free fonts. It’s also a quirky font with a lot of detail, detail that does not degrade nicely when the size of the font is reduced. Museo is a good choice for headlines or any type that’s a bit larger but a highly questionable choice for body text.
“For better or for worse, picking a typeface is more like getting dressed in the morning. Just as with clothing, there’s a distinction between typefaces that are expressive and stylish versus those that are useful and appropriate to many situations, and our job is to try to find the right balance for the occasion. While appropriateness isn’t a sexy concept, it’s the acid test that should guide our choice of font.” – Dan Mayer, http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/12/14/what-font-should-...
yes, it renders and looks fine but museo it's not the best choice for big blocks of text. Comics sans also renders great and you wouldn't use it here, right?
Since you were polite, I'll actually explain. Museo 500's tendency to block up is something I deliberately exploit. My tumblr is not often a venue for long-form blog posts; it is almost exclusively for link sharing and my photography. Small blocks of Museo "flow" very well along with those sorts of media posts. Long blocks blend together and stream past, providing only a slight interruption to the flow of media and links.
I admit it's sub-optimal for long form posts like this, but it's a tradeoff I've decided to make for the sake of the majority of my tumblr's content. I could make a script to detect when the tumblr is showing a single post, changing the font. I just haven't yet, and I don't get that many complaints. Most people are happy to see any sort of original design and deliberate typography on a blog, even if it isn't perfect.
I still think it's fairly readable. Compare it to the readability-required status of even big-name content pushers like the Chicago-Sun Times. My site is an order of magnitude easier to read, even if their body font is a bit easier in block form.
> I still think it's fairly readable. Compare it to the readability-required status of even big-name content pushers like the Chicago-Sun Times. My site is an order of magnitude easier to read, even if their body font is a bit easier in block form.
I agree. But I don't think comparing your site to a horribly formatted, but established, site is a good argument. IMO the font is not good for reading even if your site is the most accessible site in the whole world. At the end of the day I think it boils down to whether I have to squint and get distracted by the flow in order to read the content.
Also when there are more than one person complaining about the font (and others who have not complained but upvoted the complaining comments) its something to think about. They might not be necessarily right just because its a relatively popular opinion, but they might be in to something.
Such a well written post deserves a better font. IMO.
Well, let me throw my voice in, too. If I didn't have Readability, I would not have read your article. Out of curiosity, I reloaded the page and tried reading it as was originally presented, but it felt taxing, and I switched back quickly.
The problem, I think, is that the spaces between letters are much smaller than the internal negative spaces of the letters. The little horizontal flairs on the sides of many letters in Museo exacerbate this issue. This ends up making it really hard for me to recognize the letters which have no internal negative space, most notably i, t, and r, since they tend to bleed into their neighboring letters at this small size.
Chrome 9 beta running on Win 7 - the text is readable, but the font doesn't make for easy scanning of paragraphs of text (compared to a serif'd font like Times New Roman).
