In an effort to
- make you, the reader of this web site, happier,
- satisfy my ongoing urge to do mildly fiddly things with CSS, and
- most importantly, give away something really cool like PDFpenPro for FREE,
I’m doing a survey. Huh? Just wait a second, but yes, you read that last bullet right. The awesome folks at Smile have agreed to give away a license for one of my all-time favorite Mac applications, PDFpenPro (normally $99.95).
Okay, okay. Settle down. Let me tell you how this is going to work.
I’ve been thinking about running all the serifs out of this here web site and going with a cleaner font that may just be more readable than what’s here now.
Enter:
5, 4, 3, 2, 1. . . Open Sans
Update: Apparently Google Fonts, including this one, don’t always get along well with with Firefox in Windows, so you may not be seeing what you’re supposed to see. Sorry about that.
Be sure to leave your cozy RSS app for a minute and actually visit http://www.practicallyefficient.com directly because this text is in a different font than the previous paragraphs.
I’m not going to get all fancy schmancy with font talk because honestly I’d be pretending to know something about stuff I don’t.
I just want to make Practically Efficient as readable as possible. Period. End of agenda.
But before I just up and made the change, it occurred to me that you might want some say in the matter. After all, you read this thing. So I’m taking a poll—a super simple, one-question survey—to see which you would prefer: what’s been here a while now (Georgia), or what you’re reading right now (Open Sans).
Be sure to provide your email address when you vote if you want to be entered in the drawing for a free PDFpenPro license. I will randomly select the winner on Saturday, June 4, so cast your vote before then.
Unfortunately only one person will win a free PDFpenPro license, but if you work with PDF on your Mac often, I highly recommend at least trying out a trial copy of PDFpen or PDFpenPro. It offers a powerful set of features at just a fraction of the cost of Adobe Acrobat for Mac. I use it regularly to fill out PDF forms, annotate PDF, OCR (creatively sometimes), redact sensitive parts of PDF, and even encrypt PDF.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Open Sans! As for the fancy font talk: it’s based on Droid Sans, but has more variants (not just regular and bold), looser letter spacing and a lighter default weight. It was designed for Google Webfonts by Steve Matteson.
I like the Open Sans when it is bold, but the regular version is kind of blurry and gray, rather than black.
FYI, I have my monitor set to native resolution so that shouldn’t be an issue. I mostly read from RSS, so I wouldn’t be particularly affected either way.
Open Sans! I prefer sans serif fonts when I am reading online.
Just for clarification:
The comment field requires an email to be entered. Do we need to also write our email out in a comment for the whole world to see?
Please use the survey form to enter your email address. Thanks!
Whoa! It would help if I noticed the nice big link showing me where the survey was!
Thanks.
Comparing just the two samples, Georgia is *much* easier to read for me. Open Sans seems a bit too condensed and I’d like to see it a point size bigger at least. Maybe try the 600 variant as well. Did you look at Puritan? It’s closer to the PE logo font.
Open Sans most definitely! Georgia is too squishy, Open Sans is…open and airy, the letters have breathing room. For me it’s much easier to read, I think it evokes a simple, clean and well…efficient look.
Open Sans FTW. However, Google Chrome 12 beta made me reload the page 3 times to see the correct font, for some reason.
I read your posts with Reeder for Mac, but on those rare occasions I jump on the website it’s really nice to see something else than the good ol’ Georgia. I hope the font in the comments will change to Open Sans as well.
Yes, if I go with Open Sans, it’ll be everywhere. It actually looks much nicer when it’s all over the page and not mixed in with Georgia, which dominates things here right now.
Georgia, but a little bit bigger.
Open Sans is preferred by a friend with dyslexia. She constantly moans about the difficulty she has with “serifed” fonts. The text moves about the screen apparently.
I like Open Sans, but maybe I’m just prejudiced in favor of sans serif fonts.
Interesting. On my Galaxy Tab, Open Sans looks amazing. As mentioned earlier it is blurry on XP using Chrome 13 beta. I’ll check it out on the CR-48 later and on Firefox and IE8 tomorrow.
BTW, as of an update or two ago, the CR-48′s default font is Open Sans.