Reuters vs. Good Typography
Bad things happen to good people. And sometimes bad typography happens to good designers. I know designers who tend to think that slapping Zapfino on a design will make it look smart and classy. But really, there is absolutely no excuse for the typographic void that is Reuters.com
Don't get me wrong, I love the Reuters design - it's probably one of the best designed online news outlets around (right next to the New York Times, the Int'l Herald Tribune, BBC News and Newsvine). Which seems to suggest that there must have been a large team of very good designers involved in its making.
And apparently, some very typographically challenged ones. There are five different sans-serif faces spread across the site (one for the logotype, one for headlines and navigation, one for the search-button one for body and another one for the A/V Graphics and self-promo). No serifs.
There is nothing wrong with basing a design solely on sans-seifs of course - but at least try to keep the number down!
The choice of type is equally bad, of course. The headers and navigation is set in Arial, the body type in Verdana. Of which I like neither. Why Arial is a bad choice (esp. for the headlines) should be obvious to all, and besides the fact that I dislike Verdana on a personal level, it is not a very good complimentary face to Arial.
And then you top it all off with the soft, almost Avenir-ish graphics-type, which in itself is very good - but alas, makes the Verdana stand out even more like a sore thumb.
Reuters.com is really the main reason I always disable Arial and Verdana on my macs. With these badly drawn fonts disabled, Reuters reverts to an orgy of Helvetica-goodness. And who doesn't like that?
Another very well-designed news outlet is El País (http://www.elpais.com), a newspaper in Spain. It looks remarkably similar to International Herald Tribune.
Wow… I hadn’t even looked at El País before… It IS very IHT YT-ish… Especially with all that Georgia all around the place..
I’m just wondering how long it’ll be before we all grow tired of Georgia, and all the sites that now look fresh and exciting (in a conservative meeds trendy kind of way) will look outdated…
I hope it’s not happening soon, though… I love living in a world where text figures are cool again!
Well, for me it all depends on what typeface it is, and what context… Generally I’d agree with you that sans-serifs are usually much more screen-friendly, and informal - hence staying in touch with the informality of the web…
However, I’m really getting sick of all-sans web-2.0-wannabe sites like the new CNN-site… And I really love it when people take typographic tradition, and bringing it online. And as such, the serifs have a lot more tradition to take from…
There are good and bad uses of each category, and of any typeface on the web - even Times New Roman can look gorgeous ( http://www.coudal.com ) and even Helvetica can look bad (see CNN)…
How about Arial? I Arial’d my entire site. =D
I’ve disabled Arial from my system… (=’.’=)
Arial is slightly better than Helvetica on small sizes for low-res screens - but that’s still no excuse to use the sloppy typeface from hell!
Woot Woot! Let’s hear it for typographic sensibility! Great post.
2.) I agree about Verdana. It’s personally offensive to me. I work with some people who feel like it’s the “O.K.” alternative to Arial. How wrong they are…
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