Weekly Roundup - Issue #11

This week at work, a situation made me wonder about the trends in web typography; why did folks switch to system fonts in their stack and why did some companies start creating their own typefaces.

I asked around for links to articles that may provide a hint to why this change began.

Switching to system fonts seemed to have been more about the capability to modernize the font stack from the ancient Helvetica, Arial, Sans-serif stack as @mdo explains in this post.

Shipping system fonts to GitHub.com – @mdo

I’m finally publishing this blog post I drafted over a year ago. It was incomplete when I started to revisit it months ago, but I figured it’s better to share it now than sit on it forever.

markdotto.com

An older post from Medium talks about their approach to adapting system fonts in their UI. Sadly, they don’t go into detail as to why at that time they chose to use system fonts for the interface while keeping Keivit (for headings) and Charter (for body) of the stories.

Project TNT. The next evolution of type on Medium – Brad

It’s late Thursday night in the Medium office, a week before the 2.0 launch. Marcin, a fellow designer and typographer, is sitting a few feet away. We’ve hit that moment in every project…

medium.design

In this next article, Booking’s designers try to do the same and find intriguing bugs while implementing this change.

And remember folks, web design is 95% typography…

Web Design is 95% Typography –

It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.

ia.net

And I end with this nerdy dive into why hyperlinks are blue; a standard that we’ve taken for granted seems to have murky origins.

Why are hyperlinks blue? – Elise Blanchard

We took a deep dive into the history of interfaces and link designs over the years to track down the origin of the blue link we know today.

blog.mozilla.org