A Love Letter to a Font

image from ArtBreeder

filed under site on 23 Nov 2016
tagged rambling and fonts

Dear Lora,

You are still my favorite font ever for reading standard paragraphs of text on a screen. I love the way your italics are so tantalizingly upright – so shocking and unexpected yet subtle – and how sweet you are in long paragraphs. How you make text legible without making the place look futuristic or blocky.

However, you must know I’ve been seeing a lot of OpenSans at work; it is just the nicest font ever for buttons and text that must be instantly legible in small chunks. A bit boring, of course, but a good sort, practical and useful and quite appropriate for most situations.

Of course, I do sometimes fall back in with the various book fonts – Gentium Basic, that lovable rogue, or Crimson Text, or even sometimes Bitter. Sometimes you just need a good serif, you know? Something cozy that reminds you of happier childhood days spent reading by the fire.

And I don’t think we need mention all the times I’ve experimented with various display fonts like Homemade Apple Pie and Dr. Sugiyama. Those were brief dalliances, ultimately passingly brief and utterly meaningless (except for Cormorant, now there’s a well-rounded display font for you).

I blame Google fonts; it’s just so easy to be tempted! Should you hear rumors of my current obsession with the shockingly forward Istok Web, be assured that they are in fact quite true, but you still have my ultimate loyalty.

Ys,
exposit

P.S. Pythia looks amazing with the maintext set to Istok Web. It’s a nod to the origins of the game in the old days and very readable as well. I highly recommend it.