Page MenuHomePhabricator

Rethink current typeface guideline by delivering platform-neutral fonts to users by ULS as default
Closed, DeclinedPublic

Description

“The Wikimedia Design Style Guide ensures a consistent look.” However, the current guideline of typography is directly contradicting the central idea of the style guide by recommending "relying on the operating system's default sans-serif typeface".

Why

By not having a platform-neutral font creat inconsistency across platforms, increasing the possibility for devices not rendering Unicode that is not in the font they use on their systems. Not having a platform-neutral font also create inconsistency across languages.

There are already problems as small as inconsistency of logo font in Japanese between mobile and desktop and as big as unable to predict which CJK Unicode is not been able to display on user's device, creating unnecessary editing restriction.

In short, typography is just as important as the rest of the visual style guide and we should achieve consistency by setting platform-neutral fonts to achieve great readability and accessibility.

Suggestion

I suggest using the Noto font family as this open font family supports more language than any other open font, which is perfect for the Wikimedia Project. By using the Noto font family, we can make sure the consistency of the font type between languages. By utilizing woff2 format, we should be able to deliver the majority of the font in the family in a file less than 100kb, which should have minimum server impact. Also, since it is now 2020 rather than 2013, all the challenges listed in ULS's Webfont introduction have now been conquered by the newer browsers and newer formant, woff2.

Conclusion

As all challenges that previously prevent ULS to enable Webfonts by default for WMF wikis is not resolved, current typeface guideline should be reconsidered. It is time for WMF to embrace their fundamental ideology in their Design Style Guide by setting the Noto font family as the default font in the guideline of typography and let ULS enable Webfonts by default for WMF wikis.

Event Timeline

It would be a great thing to consider even if the desktop improvement is not able to work on this in the few years, keeping it as a backlog.

@VulpesVulpes825 Two quick answers:

  1. We recommend for relying on platform-specific fonts to cater diverse language scripts users in their specific OS platform. Consistency doesn't need to translate to consistent font on all devices, it's fine from a design perspective to have similar font choices on different platforms even of lesser widely used scripts.
  2. We deliberately have gone away from web fonts for our running text (sans-serif) choices as there is still a performance impact that we don't want to burden our users with.

@Volker_E, I am concerning not just about consistency across platforms, but the consistency across languages, which is the biggest focus of my suggestion. We should at least set a font family for the logo so at least the logo part feels consistent across languages. As for "burden our users with", with @font-face been widely supported nowadays, this should no longer be an issue if we set it as "fallback". What I am concerned more is the server load, but we may able to switch to Google Font as web font deliver rather than self-hosting and delivering the font.

I believe this will take years or decades before we can achieve harmony between languages and platforms, but this is something that worth achieving and should be achieved. Otherwise, we are basically throwing the ideology of "the Wikimedia Design Style Guide ensures a consistent look" right into the trash bin when dealing with the typeface. At least Wikimedia Phabricator is delivering web font to achieve consistent look, which is a good start.

In my opinion(also as a typeface designer), Typeface consistancy across scripts is not a desirable goal. If we achieve that, we will be failing on aesthetic and legibility front. This is my criticism for Noto font also. Noto is designed as"help missing font or no tofu" solution and not designed for good typographical aesthetic for the scripts it covers. For some of the scripts I am familiar, Noto is one of the mediocre fonts available and used as a fallback font.

Please think about this a little bit more-what is typeface consistancy? For an average user, the number of familar scripts are very limited. Why should such a user expect that all other scripts should look consistant with the scripts the user familiar with? Scripts are different by nature. I have no expectation that a typeface for Malayalams script should have consistant design for Bengali or Arabic or Chinese. I may have an expectation that if they used together, they should have consistant font weight and size - but that is "typographical consistancy". On Typography aspects, we are not doing a good job. Even the design guide is vurrently insufficient for non-latin scripts. Helping long content reading is one of the most important improvement I would like to see.

but we may able to switch to Google Font as web font deliver rather than self-hosting and delivering the font.

IANAL, but this is very unlikey.

In theory one font that supports consistently all scripts seems ideal, but that also means that for a given script you may not be using the best font for it. In terms of font recommendation, the Style guide proposes a set of principles (readable, neutral and simple shapes, and open) to help experts on the script to select the best font.

This may help to achieve a certain level of consistency without imposing sub-optimal fonts to any particular community. Noto is mentioned in the list as a font family to consider, but it is up for the designers that know a particular language to determine whether Noto or some other font represent the nuances of their script to provide the best readability.

Declined taking limits of current webfont options and technical hurdles like performance impact into account. We might revisit this in the future with new typefaces and changed technological abilities.