I love fonts. They’re a great way to make your site unique. Back in the early 2010s, we were all using them all over the place.
It’s time to retire them.
This month, WordPress core pulled it’s dependency on Google Fonts and I couldn’t be happier. The concept behind the Font Natively project is incredibly simple. Remove Google Fonts, everyone wins.
Back when we added Google Fonts for core, it was not without it’s naysayers, and I was one. Am one. There are days when I cannot access Google for reasons. When my father’s in China, he can’t get Google Fonts. The web looks very different fro him.
Instead of relying on an external resource, Font Natively moves the WordPress admin back to system fonts. This leads to faster load times, especially when working offline, a removal of a third-party dependency, and a more native-feeling experience as the lines between web experiences and apps continue to blur.
With this in mind, as much as I love Fonts and especially Fonticons like Font Awesome, I’m stepping away from them. And really this is me moving on and giving up the control over my website having to look a specific way.
This is a philosophy. The site will never be pixel perfect for everyone. People look at my sites on tablets, phones, Macs, Windows, etc etc and so on and so forth. The concept that you can absolutely control the specific layout, every single molecule, is long gone. The best we can do is make it look as good as possible on all those things.
Part of making the site look better is making it load better, and better here means faster, which is yet another reason. I don’t need all the icons in Font Awesome, for example. I needed four on one site, five on another, and one on a third. Do the math.
As for Google Fonts? Well. They had their day. But even Google tells you that using blog and italics and all that would slow your site down. Guess what? I use bold and italics a lot. I like emphasis. So for me, I was always going to need them, and it was always going to slow things down.
And finally, finally, it’s 2016. We didn’t have good system fonts in 2008. Now we do. Let’s embrace and drop the fonts we don’t need and only include the ones we require.
Comments
2 responses to “De-fontification”
Love this post. I have been going around google fonts for a little while now, manually putting them on my server and not having to wait.
What are “system fonts” now? Are they the old 4 fonts that you could use before the google fonts craze broke out?
@Denise: System Fonts are the ones on your own computer. They used to be universally crap, unless you were on a Mac. Windows NT in particular had some nasty fonts. With the advent of HD/Retina monitors, though, they’ve improved greatly to the point that we can be reasonably sure it’ll be okay.
I’m partial to Verdana and Georgia, both of which were created by Microsoft for use on the web. Anything but Times New Roman 🙂