Please Stop ‘Fixing’ Font Smoothing

Dmitry Fadeyev:

So here is yet another plea for designers to stop “fixing” WebKit font smoothing by disabling subpixel rendering. Feel free to use it on light text on dark backgrounds, feel free to use it to fix custom font rendering on Windows or to style specific bits of text on the page to make it look more slender, but for main portions of text where readability is paramount please leave the default setting alone and let the operating system handle the smoothing.

Hear, hear. While you’re there, Fadeyev’s entire UsabilityPost is well worth checking out. (Thanks to Joe Clark.)

★ Wednesday, 14 November 2012