Blogging should be simple

While designing this blog I’ve experimented with fonts from Google Fonts, which is a service providing a trove of wonderful typefaces. Eventually, I found something fitting and added them to my website.

Soon, I got rid of them.

The names are still there, so if you happen to have them on your device, the site will look how I originally envisioned. I’m considering removing even those. The experience is now mainly designed for the humble and widely distributed “Liberation”, “Arial” and “Times New Roman”.

None of these fonts are provided for you when accessing the website. If you don’t happen to have any of them - I hope you’ll enjoy whatever fallback your environment is equipped with.

Benefits:

  • Time and bandwidth dedicated to fonts reduced by a 100%.

Now that the investors are convinced, here are the real reasons:

  • I’ve read there are some issues1 with the Google Fonts privacy policy and GDPR. Apparently some efforts were made to alleviate them, though I don’t know what’s become of it.
  • I couldn’t be bothered to look for alternative providers or explore the precise details for distribution licensing of the specific fonts.

I don’t want to facilitate the collection of your personal data. I care about my privacy, and I wish to extend that care to the wonderful people visiting my little e-garden.

Maybe you don’t need fancy fonts

My design goals could be summarized as:

  1. Maintainability.
  2. Readability.

Earlier this month, when it came to me in a dream that I should make a blog, it turned out some dude already booked the domain I wanted. It was past me. He thought this operation would not need any docs, while I wished he prepared for the worst.

Fortunately, not much to learn, and nothing broke. This could’ve been a different story if there were more moving parts.

But lets say I know all my libraries, build tools etc. and somehow they remained stable for 2 years. Everything is properly documented. The following is a non-exhaustive list of what else could change:

  • The dependencies could vanish from the CDNs.
  • The CDNs could vanish.
  • Your hosting provider could vanish.
  • The privacy policies of the above.
  • Licenses for the libraries and fonts.
  • Local laws.
  • What “local” is.

Keep it simple, if you can.

  1. GDPR ruling for serving a website with fonts from Google Fonts ↩︎