> 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.
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.