I’m trying out another new look for this blog. This design will probably evolve over time, but I am excited about the new direction — most significantly, the new colors, and the custom fonts using @font-face in CSS. The fonts are from a site I just discovered and am very excited about: The League of Moveable Type (no relation to Movable Type, the blogging software).
Of course, Internet Explorer won’t support it, so the fonts degrade to more common, standard, and boring options.
Let me know what you think!
Comments
6 responses to “Trying out a new look”
Some of the fonts are hard to read. Looks pretty good though otherwise. Very retro.
I’m guessing you’re looking at it with ClearType turned off? Probably does look pretty nasty without anti-aliasing. It’ll look better when you buy Windows 7 on Thursday.
I’ve decided for now to drop the custom fonts other than the one I’m using for the headers. There were some issues with the fonts I was using (not the least of which was the fact that there were no bold or italic options). But this isn’t the last you’ll hear of
@font-facearound here!I was going to say I couldn’t see much difference, then I read your comments.
The colour reminds of the old colours that kitchens were painted in Australia in the 50s.
Can I ask, even though you may not like IE why design something knowing it won’t look fine to the majority of users?
(hmm, you like Flight of the Conchords, I haven’t watched them for at least a year but loved them – I honestly didn’t think the show would work outside NZ/AUS)
“Can I ask, even though you may not like IE why design something knowing it won’t look fine to the majority of users?”
That’s a valid question. A few factors to consider:
1. The majority of visitors to my site actually are NOT using IE. It represents about 17% of my traffic. Then again, one visitor (me) is skewing the results heavily to Mac/Firefox. Tell all your friends to visit and drive up my IE stats!
2. “Graceful degradation.” Current web technologies allow designers to target the features of newer browsers while still providing an acceptable alternative experience for less-capable browsers (read: IE before version 8).
3. Pushing the web forward: web design can’t evolve as long as we build to the limitations of IE6. It’s a deliberate tactic, when we’re free to take the risk (on our own sites, or for forward-thinking clients) to push those boundaries in hopes of encouraging visitors to upgrade their browsers.
Now, as it happens, with the matter of the font I decided to scale it back NOT because of IE, but rather because of the combination of Windows XP and Firefox. IE won’t show the new fonts anyway, since I didn’t create OET versions, but Firefox will. And on WinXP, anti-aliased text is turned off by default, which would probably make things look really nasty. That, combined with my frustration that the font I was using for body copy had no italics or bold, was enough to push me back. But I’m still providing multiple font options in CSS: Macs get the (subjectively) superior Helvetics Neue, while Windows users get Arial. That’s pretty common practice.
Thanks for replying.
I would be one of the 17% (but I also use FF with your site as well.)
I was really happy with IE7 but IE8 just crashes every ten minutes or so when I have a ton of tabs open – because of this I have gone back to FF (I prefer the IE use of tabs though).
To be honest the reason I want to use IE is becuase it is built in to windows – I would rather not install another browser but IE8 is kinda forcing my hand.