Zach Leatherman worked closely with Chris to figure out the font loading strategy for this very website you’re reading. Zach walks us through the design in this write-up and shares techniques that can be applied to other projects.

Spoiler alert: Font loading is a complex and important part of a project.

The really interesting part of this post is the way that Zach talks about changing the design based on what’s best for the codebase — or as Harry Roberts calls it, “normalising the design.” Is a user really going to notice the difference between font-weight: 400 and font-weight: 500? Well, if we can ditch a whole font file, then that could have a significant impact on performance which, in turn, improves the user experience.

I guess the conversation can instead be framed like this: Does the user experience of this font outweigh the user experience of a slightly faster website?

And this isn’t a criticism of the design at all! I think Zach shows us what a healthy relationship between designers and developers can look like: collaborating and making joint decisions based on the context and the problem at hand, rather than treating static mockups as the final, concrete source of truth.

Direct Link to ArticlePermalink

The post Developing a robust font loading strategy for CSS-Tricks appeared first on CSS-Tricks.


0 Comments

Leave a Reply

Avatar placeholder

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *