<story><title>The Fastest Google Fonts</title><url>https://csswizardry.com/2020/05/the-fastest-google-fonts/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slashdev</author><text>Just use the built-in fonts. Use a good fallback list so each platform gets a good option. Specifying custom fonts is largely a waste of bandwidth for a very marginal improvement in aesthetic. The people who care most are the ones making the decision to use that font. The solution, tritely, is they should stop caring about the little details that much.&lt;p&gt;The bigger details are usually what move the needle. Don&amp;#x27;t get stuck optimizing a local maxima, which is very easy to do if you&amp;#x27;re using AB tests. Arguably the point of an AB test is to find the local maxima, but the goal should be to broaden the search space and look for something closer to the global maxima.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>There seems to be a reply like this at the top of every font-related thread on HN. I often wonder whether it&amp;#x27;s coming from designer&amp;#x2F;developers or from end users.&lt;p&gt;Web fonts aren&amp;#x27;t popular just because they&amp;#x27;re pretty. They continue to be used everywhere because they offer a consistency that&amp;#x27;s impossible to get otherwise. With a plethora of mobile devices and desktop environments, you can&amp;#x27;t get a consistent look-and-feel for a site with just installed fonts. For some really basic sites, that&amp;#x27;s totally okay and even hits a nice quaint aesthetic, but for the kinds of sites that people pay money for, that&amp;#x27;s not good enough.&lt;p&gt;Variability in system fonts means that getting consistent paragraph and header widths and spacing is impossible. It means that the text looks too dark sometimes and too light other times. It means that the font appears unreadably small sometimes and obnoxiously large other times. It means having to build a font stack and then keep it updated as preinstalled fonts change. It means spending a lot of time dealing with issues like Helvetica Neue looking okay on MacOS but rendering like ass on somebody else&amp;#x27;s desktop because they installed a free knock-off of it. It ultimately introduces a lot more complexity and fragility than properly using a locally-hosted web font.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Fastest Google Fonts</title><url>https://csswizardry.com/2020/05/the-fastest-google-fonts/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slashdev</author><text>Just use the built-in fonts. Use a good fallback list so each platform gets a good option. Specifying custom fonts is largely a waste of bandwidth for a very marginal improvement in aesthetic. The people who care most are the ones making the decision to use that font. The solution, tritely, is they should stop caring about the little details that much.&lt;p&gt;The bigger details are usually what move the needle. Don&amp;#x27;t get stuck optimizing a local maxima, which is very easy to do if you&amp;#x27;re using AB tests. Arguably the point of an AB test is to find the local maxima, but the goal should be to broaden the search space and look for something closer to the global maxima.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Elidrake24</author><text>I agree entirely; the clients don&amp;#x27;t.  It&amp;#x27;s an almost universal question brought up by them during the design phase - &amp;quot;this font looks like everyone else, we want our own&amp;quot;.  The changes to TypeKit have certainly put a squeeze on their options, but they still almost universally hate the system level fonts.  Wish I could convince the business guys to push back, but eh, there are bigger problems we face on a day to day basis.</text></comment>