It does matter! But your case is a specific one, requiring specific tools. Helvetica is still a perfectly good hammer even if you find it’s a lousy screwdriver.
Arial, however, it’s that cheap dollar store hammer with the wrong balance you always feel might come apart at any time and makes every job more annoying. Screw Arial. And most of those 1995 MS Word-mandated “web standard” crap you have to deal with, frankly.
Where was I?
Not sure. The reason I hate Arial specifically, with a fiery passion, is that practically all burned-in subtitles are in Arial, and that really sucks when you’re trying to both watch a movie with an analytical eye, read the subtitles, and listen to the dialogue when you’re trying to learn a new language.
Everything is “dated”. Even new things.
Hmmm … actually I like the new favicon.
It’s the wordmark that I think needs refinement.
But then again, what do I know? Since this stuff about Google keeps updating so rapidly, I’ll just place this here for consideration:
I wanted to link to my other post but I couldn’t find the thing when I needed it. Sorry …
What the hell?
Many folk design fonts apparently have wrong ideas about the contexts. Fail safely, consider that the defaults will end up being used for everything, design them so they won’t cause unexpected problems. So some glyphs look “wrong”, so what, as long as they are distinctive and don’t result in unnecessary helldesk calls.
Yes and no. In context of one machine, yes; I have a console font for linux that I modded for better legibility for tired eyes, with the letters I was misreading modded to be more distinct. In context of thousands of deployed machines, no. Easy to read, unambiguous(!!!) fonts should be the default there. If the user wants something that looks “pretty”, and they screw it up, it will be their fault then. For default settings, it is the fault of the designers of the font, superimposed with the fault of those who selected it as the default fault.
Function first. Learn this. Recite it as first thing every morning. Or you risk ending up being publicly hanged in front of a crowd of cheering engineers.
Since… WHEN???
Fonts like these should be the default choices. I am willing to make exceptions where the context is clear and unambiguous (e.g. a storefront) though even there there may be issues with machine reading (think augmented reality translation glasses).
What situations are you so frequently in where you a) don’t have enough context to work out what letters are what, and b) don’t have control over your fonts?
If it’s words, I don’t think I’ve ever been confused since capital letters generally go in very specific locations.
If it’s non-words, for me it’s generally code and then I’m in control of my fonts. (And even in code I have context to tell me when something should be capitalized.)
The #1 issue I have is with burned in subtitles, where I’m trying to skim them as fast as possible, and listen to the other language, and try to follow the story simultaneously. Yes there’s context, but combining all that as close to realtime as I can requires more horsepower than I have, and it’s outrageous that I have to figure out whether what I just saw was AII or All etc.
Hardcoded stuff in software or presentations. Fonts presented in bitmaps or PDF files, or the mentioned video subtitles. Acronyms. Passwords. Machines without enough configuration options or locked down. Apps with fixed font settings.
Without previous knowledge, what’s the right one? AIChE, or AlChE?
And then there are the issues of subjecting the users to unnecessary cognitive overhead, which leads to mistakes and slowed down reactions and lower satisfaction and lower performance, all just because some “font designer” thought that “pretty” is more important than “functional”.
Ever worked on a team where vendor passwords had to be shared? This is important and valid.
I issued those. I answered the calls. I ended up writing code that, when sending the generated password[1], also spelled it out in NATO alphabet, one word per letter, in a luckily successful attempt to reduce the helldesk calls. The operation was so small back then that I was all from coder to sysadmin to techsupport. Tasted it all, good and bad and ugly. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stranger.
[1] Don’t allow users to make their own or you end with atrocities like “password” or “123456” that can be guessed from the outside; by generating them you end up with passwords written on post-its, but that reduces the attacker set to the ones physically present in the office instead of having to deal with the entire Net.
And that means they’re on-camera. 
That. And that they are subjects to morale-keeping and carefully groomed image of the god present in the network, benevolent[1], but omniscient[2]. Don’t do harm and you won’t be smitten.
Over the years I didn’t have to smite anybody.
[1] Bittorrent clogging the link? “your machine sends a lot of data, could be a worm, should I take a look?”, and within a minute from when the mail arrived the problem vanished, worked regularly. Or renaming executable mail attachments instead of filtering them out - those who know how to do save-as and then run it also usually know when they shouldn’t. I let my subjects do whatever they wished, with minimal interference, with the strongest admonishments being like “that’s not a good idea”. People usually don’t want to do harm. Make it a step more difficult for them to screw up unintentionally and they will not screw up while getting done what they need, without having to call the helpdesk. After this email attachment renamer was put in operation, nobody ever ran a file that was named something.doc.exe.DANGER.
[2] Don’t brag, wait until problems occur, know enough, and the word will go around the crew. Don’t try to fake it, it’s better to be understated than overblown. Be enough of the substance, and the rumour mill will amplify it. Assume honest screwups; if they are not, forensics will tell anyway.
I’ve literally slapped a user’s corporate issued laptop out of their hands before, then ran off with it. They opened up privoxy (a “super user” instructed to always use privoxy) in order to do a google search for the IP address I was reciting to them, which they were supposed to be typing in the URL bar so we could install a printer. I lost my cool that time.
But it’s so easy for an end user not to understand what’s wrong with this. (The whole thing is non-intuitive.)
Following directions and ceasing to do whatever you’re doing on the computer when told to stop by someone whose entire job is to be better at computers than you and is trying to help is rather intuitive though.
True. But every Support call comes off the bottom line.
[quote=“shaddack, post:66, topic:64896”]
Many folk design fonts apparently have wrong ideas about the contexts. [/quote]
Do they? Most folk who design fonts understand what the functional priorities are, and that unambiguous password transcription is rarely one of them.
Since when? Since passwords became a thing—a new thing—type has had to contend with.
Passwords (like the ones cited above) are not products of body text (style, legibility, grammar, &c.). You don’t read passwords like you read a document.
There are already fonts which eliminate ambiguity. These concerns have already been addressed by font designers.
Your ire therefore appears misdirected.
A font that does not sufficiently distinguish between characters is a bad font.
Since the eternity. All the old books that went through my hands had different symbols for every character, without symbol overloading. It seems to be only a rather recent development when serifs got abandoned and vertical lines got overloaded to the point of nausea. Why? So some “designer” can feel “clever”?
And the passwords are a collateral damage of this designers’ stupidity.
Legibility does not require symbol overloading. Centuries of printing press use prove that.
Then there are those pesky mixed-case acronyms, identification numbers/strings, all sorts of part type numbers… For all of those, a “design”-oozing font is a bad idea.
Fonts should go through a mandatory acceptance testing. Which would include transcription of random character strings. Any font with higher than some baseline low-number percentage of misread characters would then have to go back to the drawing board to get those characters redesigned.
I am willing to grant exceptions for artsy fartsy fonts that won’t leave their niche applications, but that’s about it.
They should be the default. There should not be need for special fonts, which are often unavailable in a given context, double so if the text in question is already encoded as image.
My ire is perfectly directed. First, the “designers” who in their unlimited wisdom make crap fonts. Then, the other “designers” who in their even more unlimited wisdom choose those crap fonts and cram it down the world’s collective throat as the defaults.
I wish there would be some sort of a poison or bioweapon that’d be selective to all those appearance-before-functionality people. In a single swoop the world could be made to suck less.
…Thought re the acceptance testing. There are games based on quick typing of words or other text strings; several were even featured here. As they are often browser-based, and a centralized server controls the back-end, the tested fonts could be used to serve the strings. The game then adds the thrill for the users who willingly test the fonts for free and even strive to perform as well as they can under time pressure.
Other kinds of such matching games can be used for field-testing of fonts and symbols and perhaps even user interfaces as a whole.
