That’s why I’d like to suggest a more sustainable approach to choosing fonts I’ll call ‘system fonts first’. But web fonts aren’t free: yes, services like Google Fonts might not cost money, but your users are paying in other ways improvements in font loading and new font file formats mitigate but don’t solve the fact that web fonts slow down website rendering, use more data, and increase energy usage. Before then, if web designers wanted text on their site to look the same across browsers and Operating Systems, they were restricted to a few “web-safe” system fonts.įast forward twelve years: web fonts are hugely popular, while system fonts have fallen out of favour, seen by many as boring and unimaginative. Web fonts started gaining popularity with the introduction of services like Typekit in 2009. The page you’re reading right now loads six web fonts and although some of these have been subset to be smaller than your average web font file, in total, they add over 90kB to the page weight. Some of these might even be the same font but from different websites. In a single day, you might download hundreds of these files. Web fonts are font files stored on a web server, that the browser downloads temporarily for the purpose of rendering a website the way the designer intended.

System fonts vs Web fontsĪ system font is one that is installed on a computer these usually come included with Operating Systems, but can also be bundled with certain programs or installed manually. The interesting thing about the Formafantasma site is that they have made a conscious choice, but it isn’t an aesthetic one: using system fonts like Arial and Times New Roman instead of web fonts cuts down on HTTP requests, reducing the amount of data transferred and ultimately reducing CO₂ emissions. Whenever I see Arial or Times New Roman in use, I’ll assume that no conscious thought at all has been put into that decision - someone has stuck with the default, the least controversial, the easiest option.

Instead of the latest quirky sans-serif, Formafantasma have gone with two of the most ubiquitous typefaces around: Arial and Times New Roman. A few weeks ago I discovered this article in the Typewolf newsletter about the new website from design studio, Formafantasma: The Formfantasma website

Arial font stack