Comments on: Type study: Choosing fallback fonts

By: David Berlow

David Berlow — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:52:07 +0000

Well done, superb typography

But stack-wise, didn’t you just push the web font boundaries to their existing limits?

I mean, there are so few default font, and so many others, and you just selected, really all the options for a “solid dependable bold” and a “simple condensed text” ffffallback across all pppplatforms. 😉

In fact, should one not choose their fonts from those fonts ability to match some default font, and not the other way around… to be safe?

By: Josh Brewer

Josh Brewer — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 05:00:54 +0000

Great question David. But to be fair, Typekit doesn’t work without Javascript. So for this article, I made the assumption that the user has javascript enabled.

By: David Eison

David Eison — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 23:17:40 +0000

Shouldn’t ‘look ok without javascript’ should be the first fallback priority?

By: Mike Raynham

Mike Raynham — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 17:54:37 +0000

There’s some great advice in this article, and I hadn’t seen Lettering.js before. Thanks for the tip.

I like the effect in Windows, but unfortunately the fallback font falls apart a bit in Ubuntu 10.04 with Firefox 4 – even though I have Arial Black installed – the Ubuntu font works reasonably well as a replacement, although its nowhere near as heavy as Arial Black.

The other problem I noticed, in both Windows and Ubuntu is that with Javascript disabled, the headline text ends up overlapping the body text below. Setting the font size to 60px instead of 72px solved this.

By: Mandy Brown

Mandy Brown — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:25:37 +0000

In reply to John Faulds. Line breaks are easy enough; but to wrap every single word with a span and class name, as well as every character with the same, is a pain. Lettering.js makes that easier, and keeps your markup free of clutter.

By: John Faulds

John Faulds — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 12:04:42 +0000

I’ve seen Lettering.js mentioned twice in the last two days (before hadn’t come across it) but I don’t really see the point in it. If you’re going to be adding line breaks to your HTML anyway, why not just add the spans instead and then people without js will see the same design too?

By: Theo

Theo — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 08:17:20 +0000

Thank you for the great read, i learned something very useful again!

By: Josh Brewer

Josh Brewer — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 21:41:13 +0000

Kyle,thanks for the kind words.

Yes, it may be a bit redundant to specify “Droid Sans” as I am pretty sure that default sans-serif will be “Droid Sans” on most Android devices. The reason I included it was if there is any question, or if there are any other fonts that get installed, I can feel confident that the fallback will be what I have planned for. Yay! for no surprises 🙂

By: Kyle Bavender

Kyle Bavender — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:12:58 +0000

Excellent. Thank you Josh for a thoughtful, detailed post. Also: a smart, unified design from concept to articulation.

A technical question that’s nagging me a bit:

Is not the “Droid Sans” declaration redundant? I understand Android devices to fall back to DS once they see the generic “sans-serif” declaration.

Now I’m wondering if it’s common for users (or carriers with their custom UI plugins & changes) to supplant the default Android typefaces…

By: Luke Dorny

Luke Dorny — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:52:29 +0000

I’m a big fan of your work, Josh. Hrdwrk notwithstanding.
Most of this stuff is knowable freely on the web, but your tricks that wrap it up so smoothly are impressive. I wouldn’t even have considered using Droid Sans as a fallback. Fallbacks are a necessity and a smartly portion of the deliverables by professionals.
Great job. Thanks for sharing.