Links on Typography

• I studied the fonts of the top 1000 websites. Here’s what I learned. — Michael Li brings the data. San-serif has total dominance. “[…] it is rare to go below 10px or above 24px.” And poor <h5> always being the same size as <p>. Makes me feel extra sad for <h6>, are you destined to be smaller than body copy?
  
• How tracking and kerning improves all caps text — Oliver Schöndorfer gets into why ALL CAPS text generally looks better when spaced out (i.e. letter-spacing in CSS). I’m not exactly a renowned typographer, but this tracks with what I’ve always felt. All-caps looks good spaced out (sometimes quite a bit), and conversely, it almost never looks good to track out lowercase. Like the PG version of the famous quote.
  
• Leveraging System Fonts on the Web — Jim Nielsen shared some of my confusion with “system fonts” in CSS. Like we have system-ui now, which I use pretty often because it actually works in Chrome and Safari for selecting the system font (i.e. getting to use San Francisco on macOS). Before that was a thing, to leverage the same kind of thing, you’d do a big long stack. But we kinda still need the stack for real production sites, since system-ui isn’t universally supported. There is a nice world going forward though, because we’re getting ui-sans-serif, ui-sans-serif, ui-monospace, and ui-rounded. Browser support is quite limited, but it’s gonna be nice.
  
• Simpler Font Licensing: Introducing V2 — “The core of V2 is this: you buy a font, and then you can use it.” God bless ’em. As the owner of several sites that get a lot of page views but don’t have waterfalls of cash as a budget, I need web font pricing that is sane.
  
• 5 steps to faster web fonts — Iain Bean goes through the biggies: WOFF2, font-display, <link rel="preload" ...>, Subsetting, and self-hosting. And never forget about the holy bible.
  
• A New Way To Reduce Font Loading Impact: CSS Font Descriptors — Barry Pollard looks at new CSS descriptors (not just regular properties as they only work within @font-face blocks) like size-adjust and ascent-override. YES. THIS IS AWESOME. I declared perfect font fallbacks one of the all-time great CSS tricks, but alas, it required a smidge of JavaScript and hackery. This brings it all into CSS perfectly.
  
• Why You Should Stop Using Times New Roman — Vanessa Hill was asked to reformat a research paper into Times New Roman. She was told it’s because it’s so readable and researches the truth: it’s not. Personally, I can’t stand the look of it because it looks like your font-stack failed in CSS.
  
• Pixel font converter! — Looks like an ancient tool (via Remy Sharp) but I love it as it opens up the idea of creating a font to anyone who knows how to draw some letters and save a static image.

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