>You really don't have all that great a selection.
Now go count how many books, newspapers, magazines, etc, etc have their primary text in something other than one of the few common "standard" fonts. You don't need a big selection. The desire to make your site look weird is not actually a necessity, it is a desire.
>The site isn't entirely unreadable. It just takes a little bit longer to display
It is until it loads all the way, which can take quite a long time, especially on a mobile network. And yes, it is actually fairly common for some elements to timeout and not load, images, css, javascript. If you use a non-standard font for the main text, then it becomes one of those things that can fail to load.
>But even I think just blanket damning custom fonts is really extreme
So do I. Which is why I never did that. I am only saying that using a custom font for the primary textual content of the site is a choice that has purely negative impact on the user.
> Now go count how many books, newspapers, magazines, etc, etc have their primary text in something other than one of the few common "standard" fonts.
That would be most of them. The LA Times uses Ionic, the New York Times uses Imperial, the Chicago Tribune uses Mercury Text, Entertainment Weekly uses Scout — I'd actually be really hard-pressed to think of a newspaper or magazine that sets its body text in Arial or Verdana.
> It is until it loads all the way, which can take quite a long time, especially on a mobile network. And yes, it is actually fairly common for some elements to timeout and not load, images, css, javascript. If you use a non-standard font for the main text, then it becomes one of those things that can fail to load.
This is kind of a browser-dependent thing. I would argue that any browsers that display this behavior are flawed and should be fixed. However, even on browsers that don't handle this gracefully, you can work around it and handle it gracefully yourself. So I agree that if this happens, you have done something wrong, but using a distinct font was not the mistake — coding your site in such a way that your body text might never display was the core problem.
Really? Of the millions of books, most of them use a special font? The hundreds of thousands of little local papers all have their own special font? Do a tiny minority who use a "virtually indistinguishable from Times" really constitute most of them? Is a font that <0.000001% of people can distinguish from Times really creating a unique and distinct design?
>I'd actually be really hard-pressed to think of a newspaper or magazine that sets its body text in Arial or Verdana.
I'd be hard pressed to think of one that uses comic sans too, that reflects on comic sans, not the necessity of unique fonts.
> Really? Of the millions of books, most of them use a special font?
They use something a fair sight better than what's available to web designers. Whether a font is "special" or not is kinda subjective. I would not consider Ubuntu to be any more "special" than Garamond. But they certainly do not feel constrained to use a handful of fonts Microsoft licensed back in the '90s.
> The hundreds of thousands of little local papers all have their own special font?
Nobody said anything about "their own special font." Any paper big enough to hire a designer probably uses something more than Arial and Times New Roman.
> Is a font that <0.000001% of people can distinguish from Times really creating a unique and distinct design?
I guess that depends. Do you think more than 0.000001% of the population could distinguish Georgia from Times? Many people couldn't name a font if you put a gun to their head, but that doesn't mean different fonts don't matter at all. (If you do want to argue that fonts don't matter at all beyond serif and sans serif, you're welcome to that opinion, but I'm not really interested in getting into that.)
>> I'd actually be really hard-pressed to think of a newspaper or magazine that sets its body text in Arial or Verdana.
> I'd be hard pressed to think of one that uses comic sans too, that reflects on comic sans, not the necessity of unique fonts.
We have just dismissed about 30% of the fonts available to web developers under your criteria. Do you still feel like they have a good selection?
Also, again, nobody said unique fonts. A font does not have to be unique to fit a design better than another font.
That doesn't make it part of the discussion.
>You really don't have all that great a selection.
Now go count how many books, newspapers, magazines, etc, etc have their primary text in something other than one of the few common "standard" fonts. You don't need a big selection. The desire to make your site look weird is not actually a necessity, it is a desire.
>The site isn't entirely unreadable. It just takes a little bit longer to display
It is until it loads all the way, which can take quite a long time, especially on a mobile network. And yes, it is actually fairly common for some elements to timeout and not load, images, css, javascript. If you use a non-standard font for the main text, then it becomes one of those things that can fail to load.
>But even I think just blanket damning custom fonts is really extreme
So do I. Which is why I never did that. I am only saying that using a custom font for the primary textual content of the site is a choice that has purely negative impact on the user.