www.extrememakeoverwebedition.com December Winner

[Henry Valenzano, CMI]

Originally Posted by dhelm

Dam* Tony, I've got kids older than you!

But he does look OLDER then us

[dmustafich]

WOW! This must be the nicest site in the industry. And I’ve seen a lot of them. A lot…

[wforsyth]

Thanks Danny!

That brought tears to my eyes!

BTW guys, I'm pushing 40 too! I can read it but I can see where some may have problems with it. Thanks for working so hard on this for me Catherine! You are an angel!

[William Warner]

Light font on light background is a problem... but the site does look nice.

[Chris Morrell, CTO]

Originally Posted by dduffy

Looks nice Wendy, I'm pushing 50, the eyes aren't exactly perfect, but I'm sure having a hard time reading the text. A little tiny.

Well, I'm pushing 25, have 20/10 vision, and have trouble reading the text on a higher-resolution monitor. It's also the light gray on white that can make reading the text harder. That plus the fact that Tahoma is a mildly condensed font, and it's set to 10px makes the text very tricky for reading.

Just a little tid-bit about fonts:

When choosing a font for the Web there are a lot of things to consider. Nowadays you're pretty much stuck with 4-5 fonts. Arial/Helvetica, Times New Roman/Times and Courier New/Courier are all fonts that are common to almost every computer in the World. On top of that, there are a few fonts that tend to be cross-platform, but only a couple that are really safe for Web. The two prominent fonts are Verdana and Georgia (both results of a major effort by Microsoft to develop beautiful, screen-friendly typefaces). Both Verdana and Georgia work on both Windows and Mac OS machines (but don't necessarily work on Linux).

That said, there are reasons to choose each of the above fonts. Times is what's called a serif font--there are short cross lines at the end of most strokes. Serif fonts are generally more "traditional" and work very nicely in print. Arial and Helvetica are sans-serif fonts, that is, "without serifs." To generalize, sans-serif fonts are better for screen and serif fonts are better for print. That said, there is one serif font that works well on the screen, and that is Georgia. Though to many it may just look light a slightly heavier version of Times New Roman, it's actually the result of a large effort by an extremely experienced type designer (Matthew Carter) who was hired by Microsoft in the 90's to produce a pair of fonts for the Web. The other font Carter designed was Verdana (which is what you're reading right now).

Type design for the Web (or screen in general) is quite tricky. One of the major issues is that text on the screen is displayed by hundreds of tiny pixels which can microscopically take different shapes depending on whether they're white or black. Without getting into too much detail, let's just say that black pixels actually have slightly convex edges (so that they err towards a circular shape) while white pixels actually have slightly concave edges (so that they almost look like tiny four-pointed stars). This means that fonts that are meant to be displayed at relatively small sizes (where their strokes or serifs may only be one pixel wide) have to take into the peculiar shapes of the pixels that make them up.

In the end, what you need to know is that both Verdana and Georgia are designed specifically taking the above (as well as many other issues) into consideration. Though you might not notice the difference immediately, it makes a difference and can definitely make the overall experience of reading through your web site more enjoyable.

That's not to say that fonts like Arial and Tahoma don't work on the Web. Arial's another font that was designed for screen and has a number of great characteristics, but Tahoma was actually specifically designed (again by Carter) for user interface elements such as menus and dialog boxes where you don't have to read large blocks of text. It can work, but has some issues.

All of this is basically me saying, "consider increasing the font size and maybe look into replacing Tahoma with Verdana or Arial." It also is an illustration of the kind of attention to detail good web design takes.

[Chris Morrell, CTO]

Sorry for killing the thread

[wforsyth]

Thread killer!

Do you like it better now with the darker blue font?

I love the font. I have it on an extremely high resolution LCD 19" monitor and a 17" plasma monitor. But it also looks good on my cheapie Dell $299 computer/monitor.

[Chris Morrell, CTO]

Blue on gray looks a little better (a slightly lighter-than-black color on a slightly darker-than-white background tends to have great legibility close up and look coherent from a distance), but I still think the font is a bit small.