I’ve seen lots of tech people complain online about how websites are becoming increasingly bloated. I understand this sentiment, completely.
One of the culprits which is often mentioned (alongside invasive advertising and mountains of JavaScript) is (are?) webfonts. I’ve seen them be derided for being a pointless waste of hundreds of kilobytes or perhaps even megabytes of bandwidth per page load, solely to cultivate a “brand image” or because some designer thought they looked nice.
In today’s era of system-ui & co,
beautiful typography is possible in browsers
without loading any external typefaces.
Does anyone have
an excuse to use webfonts anymore?
This website used to just use Georgia. I’m a typography and type design nerd, though. I couldn’t resist picking some pretty typefaces and updating my website to use them.
Can you tell the difference between the font I’ve used and some random built-in font? Do you care? Are you at least mildly annoyed I used up 118 kilobytes of your data to load these fonts because I like them? Or am I being completely reasonable, since this is, after all, my website and my form of personal creative expression?
Luna Razzaghipour
17 February 2023