Use Lucida, Lose Your Readers
I’m sure, like me, you’ve come across sites which seem reasonably well designed but where the font looks all wonky and manky, as if it got rendered at a different size and scaled down using a nearest-neighbour transformation *. I came across one today and decided to get to the bottom of it. (For the record, it was for this interesting-sounding SEO tool.)
The cause? Not the use of <font> tags — though what the hell are they doing there? — per se, but their insistence on face="Lucida Sans". Strip them out, or bung in an accepted web font like Arial, and the lumpiness disappears.
Shame, really, ’cause Lucida Sans is a great font, but it clearly doesn’t scale well, or at least not the version installed with XP on my PC. (And no, it’s not the browser. IE6 & 7 make as much of a mess of it as Firefox does.)
Makes you wonder why the designer thought it worked. The stylesheet (yep — he or she did know about CSS) specifies an unusual body font size of 78.5% and if I could be bothered I reckon I could use this to figure out their monitor resolution. It must have been a lot of dots per inch, as there are certain high magnifications where the text looks as Charles Bigelow intended. 140% in IE7, for example.
So add this to the usual admonishments about specifying font sizes and the like: don’t be tempted to stray from standard web fonts or, SEO company or not, you may drive away visitors with unreadable text.
*My best guess is that this is exactly what’s going on.
