Cameron Senior

This site was relaunched about a month ago, so it is still fairly young. Right through the development of the redesign though, there were aspects of the site that I wasn't really comfortable with; namely the mixed typography between headers and body text. So I have decided to change the main body text to Georgia from it's original Helvetica, Arial font–stack.

Typography

I have always approached personal sites as an iterative process of development rather than a project with a defined end point. My personal taste quite obviously leans toward the minimal aspects of web design. I don't necessarily think I have got it 100% percent right with this iteration of the site, but it will keep me happy for a while at least!

That being said, the one aspect of the original design I wasn't comfortable with was the sharp contrast between the Header styles and the Body copy on the website. I really like the character that Georgia brings at larger sizes, however I felt a bit nervous about the look of the body text under older browsers like IE6, in particular the way in which they displayed Georgia. You can see from the image below that under IE6 the Georgia font looks terrible. Let's face it as a font rendering engine the IE browser until recently has been pretty awful with anything other than the stock standard Sans-serif fonts like Arial and Tahoma.

Compare that to the font rendering in IE8, which is below.

I think the difference is pretty obvious!

Seeing that of the total percentage of visitors to my website using any version of Internet Explorer 6 is a paltry 15% – I think it is a pretty easy decision to make regarding the switch!

So, have I done the right thing?

I'd really appreciate hearing people's thoughts on the changes to the typography. Having launched this site not too long ago, I realise this is asking a lot of the few people who would be reading this blog anyway! But I would appreciate it none the less!