theblogbitme

Today I received a comment on my post entitled Headers, part II from Ryan Brill that encouraged me to look further into my CSS files in my WordPress software. I have looked at these files before, but frankly, I am a little intimidated to start working on them until I have sketched out a rudimentary blog design. Today, however, I clicked confidently into my CSS file and looked for something simple that I could change. I decided on my blog font. I started changing the font in the file and then refreshing my blog to see how it looked. If you went to my blog today, you could have caught it in a myriad of fonts including Frutiger, Futura, Century Gothic, Berkeley, etc. I even almost changed it to DIN in order to get a reaction from my resident expert.

It turns out that finding a blog font is a much bigger challenge than I expected. I realized I do not like a lot of standard fonts. For example, I do not like the lower case “a” in the font represented in this post. Who writes an “a” like this in real life? I also want a font that has neutral quotation marks so that when I write out sample code, the quotation marks are represented correctly. I need a sans-serif. I need a main font, but also alternative fonts. I need fonts that are on Macs (which I prefer) and PCs (which still rule the majority of the internet world). I should have known this font change would not be “simple” when the first chapter of the book my resident expert purchased for me, Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm was entitled “Flexible Text”. The font is not the only factor of this CSS decision. How will this font render in the design of the page? How will you need to change the width between each line in order to accommodate the font? How will this font recreate source code? I am sure there are many more intelligent questions to ask. However, today as I sat in front of my desk with a Mac on my left and a PC on my right, each font change looked completely different on each screen (my Mac is a 12 inch, my PC a 17 inch) and in each browser (my default Mac browser is Safari, my default PC browser is Mozilla). At one point, I was laughing uncontrollably because the font on my Mac had absolutely no spaces between the words on the blog, however, it looked completely normal on my PC. Sigh. This decision involves more research. Any fonts you would suggest? I need a series of fonts - a first string, optimal font - and a second string - alternate font. Let me know what you think.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 26th, 2006 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Blogging 101. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.