Is it time for Times New Roman?

by Clive Walker in Work

I have added a few basic styles to my site now.

Firstly, a normalising style sheet to give me a basis to work from. I thought quite hard whether I should use this or not but decided that it has some specific and useful rules that I might end up coding anyway.

Also, I have added a couple of layout elements to centre some of the content and make the posts more readable. And tweaked the post image code to support retina images.

And a few heading and link colours and styles.

Fonts, fonts, fonts

I have tested some font-family variations. As a result, I have decided for the moment to use system fonts rather than, for example, Google fonts. There’s nothing wrong with Google, or other provider, fonts of course but I am trying to make this site as minimalist and as fast as possible. UI system fonts should load quicker.

So, I have been testing a system font stack like this one:

font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 
    "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Oxygen", 
    "Ubuntu", "Cantarell", "Fira Sans", 
    "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;

… and that might be what I end up with. It’s modern and should look great on all devices.

Before that though, I wondered if I should stay with Times News Roman (or, rather, browser default) as the font. What? Times New Roman! Surely, that’s just lazy and looks ugly? Is it even possible to make a site look fantastic using Times New Roman?

Is it even possible to make a site look fantastic using Times New Roman?

That reminded me of Simon Collison’s site which, although not updated recently, still looks great. And it uses a Times New Roman font stack. Obviously, there’s more to the site’s design than the font but it shows what is possible.

So, I’ve decided to see how far I can go with Times New Roman as the main font. I don’t know that I will be able to make it look good (or anywhere close) and I may decide later that I need a sans-serif font after all. But, it’s something for me to try.

Update

13 April 2017

I’ve moved to the system font stack now. In the end, I decided that I want a more modern look and Times New Roman didn’t give me that.

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