When the text is not the content
Type foundry websites can’t follow the recommendations prescribed for all websites. Sometimes, a foundry or type specimen site will need to break “best practices,” or even do the exact opposite.
For example, the site might:
Load many, many, fonts A fairly obvious one. The typical recommendation is to limit the number of fonts a site uses, to improve the page load time and size. A foundry will be loading many fonts, and more as time goes on.
Wait indefinitely for fonts to load There are many font loading strategies for other sites, ex. quickly reverting to fallback fonts if the fonts cannot be loaded for some reason, that aren’t appropriate for foundry sites. With the exception of the user interface font, the fonts are actually the content. So, it makes sense to wait wait for them instead of showing a fallback font, even if we’d otherwise be showing “blank” content.
Namespace font families Websites might use the font’s full name in their CSS, or might make it possible to load a local version of the font if it happens to be present on the person’s system. This can cause problems when a type designers goes to their their own site: if the they have a newer (possibly buggy or in-progress) versions of the font installed on their own computer, it’s very confusing if those fonts appear instead of the uploaded versions everyone else will see.
Opt-out of translations Portions of a foundry site can prevent a browser’s well-intentioned suggestion to auto-translate certain text. In specimen text, the foundry and the visitor will want it to stay in the original language, even if they can’t read it. Depending on the scripts and character coverages in play, the font might not even support the language after the translation.
There are more, but the reason is typically the same: the typeface is the content, and the text isn’t.
Until next time,
Kenneth
Kenneth Ormandy
The word random took on a new meaning in the 2000s. Everyone I knew labelled things as random. Almost as often, my dad pointed out that what was being called “random," was not random at all. It was just slightly unexpected. As Paul Hiebert wrote in 2011 for The Awl, the dictionary definition suggests something random is: without pattern or objective; it’s perfectly unbiased. To judge by the pop-culture usages cited above, however, the word has shifted away from its traditional usage, and now...
I finally put away the holiday decorations over the weekend. When I went to pack up the artificial tree, I was again pleasantly surprised to find this diagram I’d left for myself: Years ago, the first time I had to re-pack it, I found it difficult to get it back properly into the original cardboard box. After struggling with it for a while, I eventually sorted out the arrangement. Then, I drew myself the diagram for when I inevitably encountered the same issue again. In our typographic work,...
You probably already know instinctively your type foundry site doesn’t need reviews. Likewise, if you are deciding between fonts on another foundry’s site, it’s not something you expect to see. Baymard Institute investigated this for Direct to Consumer (DTC) sites, as part of their ongoing user experience research. I think these tests are often a decent approximation for type foundry sites (albeit without a digital download focus). The outcomes suggests that DTC site don’t benefit from having...