Recently other website designers have been discussing two separate aspects of website design; graded browser support and font stacks. I think that we need to start thinking about both of these at the same time.
It seems to me that print designers have all the fun. They can have any choice of type for their projects and as such their choice of type actually defines their work, an obvious example is David Carson. On the other hand, website designers are usually limited to the fonts installed on the users computers. These fonts are dependent on many different aspects of each users set up, which operating system and which browser they use, even their version of office suite can affect this. So traditionally designers have limited themselves to a very small selection of fonts that almost all users are guaranteed to have installed. Recent chatter has encouraged designers to push the boundaries of the most common fonts by providing stacks with enhanced fonts for more up-to-date users. A great example of this is demonstrated by Nathan Ford of Unit Interactive.
However, I want to reverse this thinking a bit with respect to graded support. I think that we should be encouraging yet a more advanced thinking in our clients, if possible. Assuming that we can convince them to choose graded browser support then maybe we can get them to choose graded OS support too (with respect to type).
Graded browser support is an effort to move designers away from having to support IE6 as the most important browser in the world, thus allowing some of the newer CSS features included in more modern browsers – whilst still making sure that users of IE6 are presented with usable decent looking websites. So with respect to type, we should be looking at the latest fonts to be included in Windows & Macs and making these our preferential design choices, with suitable alternatives for older operating system setups.
The key thing ask your client is: “How long do you want your website to look good for?” Designing a website now, with type that looks good on the most popular OS and browser will probably mean that the design needs updating in twelve months time when it begins to look tired and the selected browser/OS combination becomes less popular. Online technology may move at a fast pace, but browser and OS popularity doesn’t. Yet we know what the future will look like because it is available now. Designing for now, means that rather than your website getting gradually older it gets progressively newer as more and more users upgrade their systems.