Design Is Ironic
So there's this meme going on "Design Is..." and various noteable bloggers in the sphere are creating desktop backgrounds with such phrases as: Design Is More Than Graphic Design, Design Is Just Owning a Clip Art Gallery, Design is More Than just Making Things Up etc.

What strucks me as ironic was the one from Wishingline entitled "Design Is More Than Choosing Nice Fonts". As can be seen from the screenshot above, the fonts on the post are seriously messed up. I've noticed this before in a few other places (most notably Peppermint Tea) and shrugged it off as a designer's poor sense of usability - but the Wishingline irony was too good to pass up.

So I test the site in IE. Same font issue. Then I asked my buddy sfdesigner to have a look on his MacBook Pro - and the fonts looked great! Had a look in FF on OSX just for good measure. Looked great there too.

So back to Windows and a solution to this problem. I check Wishingline's CSS which states: body {color: #7C8187; font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans", Lucida, "Trebuchet MS", Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 130%; text-align: center;}.

Well, it turns out that Lucida is a Windows system font and viewed without Cleartype (turned off by default) looks like muck in the browser.

While us Windows users are obviously inferior at least support in this case is offered in the form of "Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif" some 5 levels deep. Had this been placed immediately after "Lucida Grande" however, the site would render beautifully on both platforms. And so it can be safely said that design actually is more than choosing nice fonts!

Congratulations Wishingline. You've just made ironic site of the day!

Not to be a spoil-sport, here's my meme in all of its 800 x 600 goodness. Design is more than OSX. All in good fun of course :)

Update: 09.21.06 - See comments. The CSS has been updated. The site looks very pretty now :)

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