I used to have Alegreya Sans all over this website. However, I’ve been growing frustrated lately about some of the layout and typography decisions I made when I originally made the website back in August. Now, don’t be mistaken: I love that font. However, argueably, for body text, Helvetica Neue just does a better job.1
I’ve tuned the site in terms of layout and typography so it navigates and reads better. However, the most noticeable change is the change of the font and the line height settings, which have been improved to maximize legibility.
Here’s the most important changes:
- An improved detail view for articles. Instead of listing the category and post date under the title, this has now been moved to the left sidebar.
- The category picker in the archives has been moved to the left, this was previously on the right.
- Alegreya Sans has been replaced by Helvetica Neue (or Arial if you’re on Windows, unfortunately). I’m looking into Arimo as a decent replacement if you’re on Windows.
Remember when Twitter switched to Gotham and then switched back to Helvetica? Yeah, turns out people didn’t like the new font. It’s the same thing for me, although I haven’t received complaints about the font. It was just icky for me.
Not sure whether I like OS X Yosemite’s new default font using Helvetica Neue. It looks a bit out of place on my MacBook Air, but wonderful on my retina MacBook Pro. It’s going to get some taking used to, to say the least. Apple is moving to retina on the desktop and laptop, and it’s showing. Exciting times, but can the GPUs keep up? It’s a wonderful time for typography, because hinting starts to become slowly irrelevant as higher pixel density displays become more commonplace. ↩