Dressed My Sites In New Typefaces

I love typography. I prefer licensing new fonts over buying new clothes. I hardly wear new clothes, but I dress my websites in crisp, new typefaces whenever I can.

Yesterday, I typeset my personal blog in Job Clarendon, designed by Bethany Heck and David Jonathan Ross. It was the first time I used a slab-serif typeface for text. Since Job Clarendon Text, which David sent out a couple of weeks ago to his Font of the Month Club members, has a slightly lighter weight, I increased the font size for readability. Then again, I’ve always wanted the text on my blog to be a bit larger by default.

For the blog titles and headings, I used the variable display version of Job Clarendon. To keep the typographic system in the same family, I used Input Mono, also designed by David, for the dates and code samples. I hope you will enjoy reading my old blog in the new text face.

The main text for my blog was set in Euchre, designed by Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh. I would like to use Euchre for my professional portfolio site, but I didn’t want to use the same typeface on both places. After switching my blog to Job Clarendon, I could use Euchre for my portfolio. Since Euchre is a sans-serif text face, I needed a serif display face to complement it. I ended up with Aneto, designed by Veronika Burian, José Scaglione, Azza Alameddine, and Roxane Gataud.

To showcase my UX design, I was searching for a beautiful, readable sans-serif text face and Euchre fulfilled my needs. I could have used Inter, but I wanted to stand out, not in. I am not knocking Inter. In fact, I give Rasmus Andersson tons of props for making Inter ubiquitous in the UX community, higher education, corporation, and everywhere else. As of this writing, Inter has been served 6.14 billion times through Google Fonts API just over the last week. Inter is featured in more than 1.20 million websites.

Let’s keep it real. Inter and many open source fonts are popular because they are free. It is insane to me that a website project could cost between $100,000 – $200,000, but we can’t license a commercial font family. As a designer, I support small, independent type foundries. If I came across a typeface that I liked, I would license it without any hesitation if it had Vietnamese diacritics. My only requirement for choosing any typeface is the support for Vietnamese. Check out my growing list of typefaces that can set in English, Vietnamese, and many more languages.