Hi Thomas, Since last I have asked the webmaster to include all the webfont formats like Embedded OpenType (EOT) and Web Open Font Format (WOFF ). After that the corporate font (in otf by the way) renders better at more sizes, as expected it looks more bold in Chrome on Windows but Chrome always seems to render webfonts more bold than Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari. Fascinated by this font compatibility issue I bought a book called Type on Screen by Ellen Lupton. In that book there are some visual comparison pages, mainly grabs from different browsers on a series of commercially attainable webfonts - and Chrome almost always renders the embedded webfont typefaces bold. I also observe that retina displays from Apple shows fonts better than most, it's like the legibility increases on those screens. Anyways, our corporate typeface looks better now with the inclusion of all the webfont formats. So, it seems like its capable of being the display font although it was never redrawn or anything specifically for web. I can still see that Google webfonts looks crisper than ours, so I guess for it to be 100% it needs to be drawn specifically as a web font, whatever that means in technical terms, but most users won't observe the difference I think. I think you are right in terms of text size in general, the average pixel size is way larger now than back in the mid 90's where I remember I constantly used 11px Verdana for body on the average screen resolution of 800x600. Then when the average res. increased to 1024x768px I kept on setting type to Verdana 11px fixed as bodytext and that worked fine, until the break of the millennium when CSS became more supported and the use of em and relative font sizes could be used to a greater extent. I'm not that into the bits of markup like I used to be, but my perception is that the use of em is best practice. I just had a chat with a graphic designer about web font sizes and we agreed that the type size today has increased a whole lot on average. Back in let's say 1996-2001 using 19px for body text gave the page a naive and bulky look. However, I notice that some quite popular sites are hanging on to quite compact body text sizes today, news sites for instance. As a matter of fact this Adobe forum is an example of that. I am writing this in 10pt by the way, at least that's what the inline forum text editor says. I have no problem with that on a screen resolution of 1920x1200px. I also believe theres a portion of design fashion in this as well, I have noticed that readymade blogs have their own set of typeface size system going on, some have 23px for body text. Especially those whitelabel Wordpress blogs you can buy from the shelf so to speak. In terms of print I just finished a book where to my best judgment the main body type size was as small as 8 points, too small for my taste. I squinted all the way and I missed having the zoom functionality as this was on paper. Ironically it was a book about the history of graphic design called American Modernism. I remember talking to a university teacher in graphic design that meant 9 points for any type on print was legible enough, almost no matter what the typeface is. I will agree that the difference between print and screen is quite large in terms of type size cause you can play more on print just to make a visual statement, but on screen I would focus more on readability and legibility over design fashion any day. And then we have the smallscreen issues etc as well. But that's another debate I guess.
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