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Comment by trin_ | Hacker News Reader

" best practices"

like using fonts that look rubbish on anything but OSX?

Stop hating; this class is for those who want to be web designers, and we all know that wannabe designers who are not yet using OSX are a lost case (at least hiring for a designer position someone who doesn't own a Mac is like UPS trying to fill a driver position with someone who has never had a driver's license).

Hang on, but isn't designing on a Mac the wrong way around? You get something that looks beautiful on a Mac, but dreadful elsewhere? Surely you design for, or at least prioritise, for the largest audience share? i.e IE or FF?

No, I'm not saying testing on computers other than Macs is wrong -- to the opposite, I think it must always be done (except maybe specifically in cases like this when you are looking for an audience of those who want to do design).

Design isn't about looking "beautiful". Design is (1) usability, (2) propaganda that relies on your audience's associative brain (peripheral cognition) to position the product into the realm of "desirable". Right now, in the minds of most people who matter, Apple designs are more desirable than air. So if the designer you're hiring hasn't figured that part out yet, his/her value to your company will be negative.

Anyone have a screenshot on OSX for comparison? I'm on Windows and I think the font looks fine...

With javascript enabled: http://cl.ly/0Q263x2u1t2N1d3l1B3f With javascript disabled: http://cl.ly/3g1e0P3Y1b2X332B0Q0v

It's basically unreadable on Windows: http://i.imgur.com/qukor.png

Hey all - sorry about the font problems on Windows. This is just a one page site, and I'm using a font straight from the Google Web Fonts directory. I only have a mac at home, so that was how I tested it. I will certainly be more careful next time, and with a larger site would absolutely test on all browsers and operating systems.

What causes this issue? I want to know in the future to avoid something like this? Is it because you use custom ttfs or something?

The issue was caused by a webkit font rendering fix. Make sure to remove all text-stroke and text-shadow declarations for windows - these thin out the font and improve rendering in osx, but ruin it for windows (no surprise)

What browser/OS, exactly? The font is... weird (too light?) on Chrome/Win7: http://i.imgur.com/3WMkT.png

Let me know if this is fixed now

'Cardo' 16px: http://i.imgur.com/Ox8F8.png

Garamond 17px: http://i.imgur.com/ajLUj.png

Man... fonts just look so shitty on windows overall. How can you handle this? Perhaps I'll change it to garamond though, it at least looks slightly better. Thanks for the suggestion!

I'm seriously considering spending 2x my monthly salary on a Mac, just because us Windows users are now second-class citizens on the internet.

Hahaha I'm sorry! If you do, it will be worth it, I promise. I'm certainly far from rich, and my mac laptop is dying and more than 4 years old, but I love it to death and continuously open it up, fix it, and replace parts whenever they go bad - it's a real trooper.

Also, you will be blown away by the software quality on macs... when I was growing up, all the 'good' software was for windows, but now the situation has completely reversed.

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