You don’t have to use web fonts—there are some pretty nice options if you stick to system fonts (like Georgia, Charter, and Palatino).
This is a great interview with Rich on all things related to web typography—including, of course, variable fonts.
I’m so lucky that I literally get to work side by side with Rich; I get to geek out with him about font stuff all the time.
Douglas Coupland on web typography.
When I discuss the internet’s feel and its random rodeo of fonts, I think of the freedom, naivety, laziness, greed, cluelessness and skill I see there — it’s a cyberplace as wondrous as the bubbling cradle of pea-soup goo from which life emerged. The internet has a rawness, a Darwinian evolutionary texture. It’s a place where metrics totally unrelated to print typography dictate the look and feel.
The transcript of a great talk by Wilto, focusing on responsive images, inlining critical CSS, and webfont loading.
When we present users with a slow website, a loading spinner, laggy webfonts—or tell them outright that they‘re not using a website the right way—we’re breaking the fourth wall. We’ve gone so far as to invent an arbitary line between “webapp” and “website” so we could justify these decisions to ourselves: “well, but, this is a web app. It… it has… JSON. The people that can’t use the thing I built? They don’t get a say.”
We, as an industry, have nearly decided that we’re doing a great job as long as we don’t count the cases where we’re doing a terrible job.
This is already starting to land in browsers, which makes me very happy—the ability to specify how you want fonts to load/swap without needing a clever bit of JavaScript.
Google Fonts aren’t renowned for their quality but this is a beautiful demonstration of what you can accomplish with them.
Responsive images, compressive images, and icon fonts. Take your pick.
Technically, websites can do just about anything that native apps can do. And yet the actual experience of using the web on mobile is worse than ever.
A redesign with modern CSS.
Safari 18 supports `content-visibility: auto` …but there’s a very niche little bug in the implementation.
A performance boost in Chrome.