Timeline for We are switching to system fonts on May 10, 2021
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
25 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 17, 2021 at 4:38 | comment | added | Lin Du | The font looks very smooth on MacOS. It will even increase the time I use SO. Nice Job! | |
| May 16, 2021 at 10:43 | comment | added | Nagora | Any typographical decision involving Arial which isn't "stop using Arial" is the wrong decision and always has been; it's a garbage font. As has been pointed out, l, 1, and I should all be clearly differentiated by your font. | |
| May 14, 2021 at 9:42 | comment | added | MT1 | @PasserBy I vote for fast... Spare a thought for us who are 1,000s of miles away, gigabit ethernet is something we only read about on the internet. My broadband comes in on a wire across my neighbours garden and I live out in the sticks. 8-( | |
| May 13, 2021 at 15:31 | comment | added | Andrey Popov | THANK YOU for this comment! An idea with good intent doesn't mean it's good. And more people need to reason it before acting. This shift if a major disappointment, which makes sense only from a very weird perspective. Using the site on various devices looks amazingly awful! | |
| May 13, 2021 at 13:05 | comment | added | val - disappointed in SE | The only positive thing about new fonts is that now you never know what you have copied until you paste it into code editor! | |
| May 12, 2021 at 17:48 | comment | added | Peter | This font change introduces difficulty for me to read the text on stack websites, specifically, the monospace font used on windows for syntax highlighting looks fat and is hard to read, the segue ui font as others have commented, looks like a comic sans-inspired design. Why isn't this an option for users to decide to use? | |
| May 11, 2021 at 11:29 | comment | added | Tomalak | @Zoe I'm not interested in a brand font, really. I'm also completely uninterested in "consistency" although I understand that someone at SO might be. As far as I am concerned, the personal preferences of someone at SO don't apply to me, and they should not overrule my own. There is a perfectly good font preference setting in my browser's options, and optimally, I'd like that to work. | |
| May 11, 2021 at 11:21 | comment | added | Zoe - Save the data dump | @Tomalak For the little it's worth, the question says: "Displaying custom fonts is getting more realistic every day at our scale, so we may revisit that choice at some point, and come back to a more consistent experience. System fonts let us modernize in the meantime without too many drawbacks." - this is a strong indicator that custom fonts are coming. The when is of course unknown. | |
| May 11, 2021 at 10:54 | comment | added | Tomalak | Agreed. This is an incredibly ham-fisted and nonsensical change. Fonts have been a browser setting (and thus a user preference) for as long as the web has existed. It's actively user-hostile to take that away from people, and value the company's preferences higher than the user's in this really subjective area. Anybody who wants their browser to look like their system settings dialog could set it to do exactly that before, there's no added value in forcing it. And personally I don't care how SO looks like on the next person's Linux box, the "consistency" take is completely bogus. | |
| May 11, 2021 at 10:45 | comment | added | Zoe - Save the data dump | In an optimal world, we'd have a universal font where these edge-cases don't exist, that also plays nicely with unicode. In the meanwhile, Arial is a step in the opposite direction, not in a useful direction. | |
| May 11, 2021 at 10:43 | comment | added | Zoe - Save the data dump | Fonts where l and I are identical rely so heavily on contextual reading for understanding the character that anywhere context fails, I have to switch to Vim (where I have a readable font set by default) and paste the text to have a chance of understanding what it's meant to say. Arial is a shitty font in that regard, but it's so wide-spread that the problem exists everywhere. If that problem can cease to exist on SO and SE, I'm happy. It currently has on my OS too (Mint, Ubuntu derivative using the Ubuntu font). | |
| May 11, 2021 at 10:41 | comment | added | Zoe - Save the data dump | I don't mind loading fonts, but please, please, please don't give us Arial back. I already mentioned this on the question, and Arial is one of the unnecessarily many fonts where I and l are essentially identical. For me personally, that makes certain (largely abbreviations) impossible to read, because I have no idea if the I is meant to be an I or an l. There's a lot of talk about fonts being hard to read, but I'm surprised l vs I isn't mentioned more. | |
| May 11, 2021 at 8:04 | comment | added | Tim | "generally small (~100kb) font file" - That's not small, at all. And it adds another web request that's executed strictly in sequence, after the HTML has loaded and parsed, and after the CSS the HTML references has loaded and parsed. Plus, another point of failure. The web today as a whole feels as responsive as MySpace in its day. To fix that we need to convince designers to stop having an opinion on what's small or what's fast. | |
| May 10, 2021 at 16:58 | comment | added | FreeMan | @AaronShekey "modernize our typefaces" follows the Microsoft Way™ of change for change's sake. Not at all a fan of the Segway font (misspelling intentional). Looks really ugly now, just like all the default fonts in MS Office, which I promptly change. #NotADesigner Frankly, the Arial is far more clear and readable to my eyes. | |
| May 9, 2021 at 23:56 | comment | added | Passer By | ^That, plus I want the rendering to be imperceptibly fast. The fonts swapping suddenly 100ms after the page loads is 100ms slower than I like. | |
| May 9, 2021 at 1:47 | comment | added | Hong Ooi | As a user, I couldn't give two shits about a "brand" and "identity", I just want to be able to read the code I'm copying and pasting | |
| May 8, 2021 at 5:58 | comment | added | Damir Kotoric | Another multidisciplinary designer chipping in :) I second that performance and accessibility is more important than a unique brand. The logo, colours and URL do more than enough to carry the brand, and I wish more companies put a greater focus on creating value for the user rather than looking unique. | |
| May 7, 2021 at 7:13 | comment | added | Walfrat | Basically, they're following the train of others companies doing the same. On a personnal note, it's true that if each site I would visit had a distinct font, it might hurt my eyes to constantly switch from one font to another. | |
| May 6, 2021 at 15:59 | comment | added | Aaron Shekey StaffMod | Hard to address each of your questions, but lots of your questions are addressed in my original post. Our designers agree with this decision. Many websites, including what I consider our peers take this system typeface approach, GitHub being the closest audience we have. | |
| May 6, 2021 at 15:57 | comment | added | Aaron Shekey StaffMod | A fellow designer! 👋 We have opted to not load webfonts at our scale. Stack Overflow, despite being one of the top 50 visited websites, is fast and we'd like to keep it that way. Everything's a budget, right? We download CSS, JavaScript, and maybe eventually, fonts. We'd have to delete a lot of legacy CSS before we have the budget for fonts. For now, this allows us to modernize our typefaces. | |
| May 6, 2021 at 13:11 | comment | added | David42 | Currently there is a tension between achieving a consistent look for branding purposes and making the site look good. The version of Arial which Microsoft licensed for use as a web font is from 1996. It only has about 500 characters. The typeface itself is from 1982 when we used fuzzy CRT monitors. If they used that, then type quality would go down on millions of devices and scattered bits of text would be displayed in visually incompatible fallback fonts. | |
| May 6, 2021 at 9:53 | history | edited | tripleee | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 6, 2021 at 7:28 | comment | added | Tetsujin | [Also not a designer] Personally, if it makes things more legible I'm all for it. I remember when Ask Different used to have its own, very clean font; then a few years ago everything went to the same fuzzy font that Super User had been using. I'd like 'clean' back & if that's San Fransisco, then that will suit me just fine. I honestly don't care how it looks on Windows [nor do I imagine Windows users will care how it looks on Mac] Responsive design means it's going to look different on every screen anyway. | |
| May 6, 2021 at 6:32 | comment | added | Meta Andrew T. | Not a designer, but the move might be influenced as a replacement of native (web) app on mobile (since the official SO and SE mobile apps have been "sunset"), like how Flutter decides the font for different OS. | |
| May 5, 2021 at 23:56 | history | answered | Davbog | CC BY-SA 4.0 |