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Comment by vpdn | Hacker News Reader

"The kind of typography I’m talking about is not your typical “What font should I use” typography but rather your “knowing your hanging punctuation from your em-dash” typography."

Is there a good solution to the first problem? I constantly find myself confronted with the problem which font I should use. Is there maybe a service that suggests fonts based on a visual design? Or even based on the 'purpose' of a site?

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I find it funny how HNers always want everything to be a "service". It's not a service, but I did write a blog post that might help you out: http://sachagreif.com/more-google-webfonts-that-dont-suck/

The point of the article is that the first problem is not so much a problem and more of an afterthought compared to the more fundamental issues of spacing, proportion, weight, characters per line, and placement on the page, which all equal readability. Once you have considered those, you can more or less drop in whatever typeface you like and then ask yourself whether it improves or detracts from readability and whether it matches the overall tone you are trying to set with your design.

I strongly disagree. These decisions are never independent in practice, but if anything, I’d say the specific font(s) used in a design would influence choices of spacing and layout more than the other way around. For example, I don’t think you can choose leading or justification settings well without taking into account factors like the x-height and typical character widths in your text.

Picking the right typeface is hard, never mind pairing fonts or crafting typographic details.

You should try out http://beta.typecastapp.com — a tool for experimenting with type. It lets you visually compare web fonts from Typekit, Fonts.com, Google Web Fonta then export your work as HTML & CSS (disclaimer: sorry for the shameless plug. I'm one of the Typecast team).

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