Font-Stack rebound for Dribbble

Couple of weeks back, I received a dribbble invite from Tuhin. It’s truly an amazing resource of design ideas and inspiration. I’m already in love with it. It’s beautifully designed by Dan Cederholm but by using better font-stack it can be enhanced even further. dribbble_ball

With over 2143 players, Dribbble is populated by world’s most talented designers and I am sure most of them are using:

  1. Acrobat Reader 8 or greater
  2. Adobe Creative Suite CS3 or greater
  3. Mac OS X Leopard or at-least Windows Vista

Now according to Richard Rutter’s font-matrix, Myriad Pro is bundled with Acrobat 7 and Adobe Creative Suite CS3 whereas Segoe UI comes with Mac OS X Leopard and Windows Vista. Also Acrobat Reader 8 comes with Myriad Pro and Minion. Since Myriad Pro and Segoe UI are so common on designers’ systems why not use them to enhance the font-stack of Dribbble.

font-family:
"Myriad Pro", "Segoe UI", "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif;

dribbble myriad pro

Here is the snapshot of my dribbble page with Myriad Pro as primary font.

References:

12 Comments

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  • # Jamie McElwain
    says on August 18

    I think you may be onto something here.

    Dribbble is one of the best sites out there, but it seems as if minimal consideration went into it’s fonts. Myriad Pro and Segoe UI are brilliant choices. They fit almost perfectly into Dribbble’s design.

    Have you contacted Dan about this?


  • # Tom
    says on August 18

    Your forgetting about the probable 10000+ visitors who dont have mac or use Adobe software… and in my personal opinion i prefer the existing fonts that are in use to the fonts you have proposed.


  • # Amrinder
    says on August 18

    @Tom: I’m not forgetting about the 10k+ visitors on Dribbble. Myriad Pro and Segoe UI is only for those lucky pals who have them installed on their systems. Helvetica Neue and Arial will happily embrace rest of the crowd.


  • # Ingo
    says on August 18

    This is all neat. But I see a tendency that the tiny percentage of Mac users start to ignore the world, just like in those browser war times. Take a look at your site with Windows (XP, cleartype off) – almost unreadable.


  • # Tuhin Kumar
    says on August 18

    Really liking the idea here.
    @Tom Like Amrinder mentioned, noone is getting nglected. Some are just getting preferential treatment. Somehow the bolds of Myriad Pro are looking too bold. What OS were you on, when this screenshot was taken?


  • # Amrinder
    says on August 18

    @Ingo: Dribbble and my blog is for designers to cherish and not someone who’s still bugging around XP (with cleartype-off) and why would someone with XP (with cleartype-off) care about design and stuff. And here I’m talking about some regular font-family usage and not @font-face or typekit.

    @Tuhin: About the Myriad Pro-bold, we can use font-weight: 700; to use semi-bold version of Myriad Pro to reduce its fat.

    FYI: Snapshot was taken on Mac OS X 10.5.8 in Firefox 3.6.8


  • # Ted Goas
    says on August 18

    I like how you challenge some of the big boys in our field… and love the explanation as to how you’ve covered your bases in creating this designer-specific font stack.

    I just don’t see enough of a difference to make a fuss. I wonder what Dan / Meagan think.


  • # Evan
    says on August 18

    Actually, I find I prefer Helvetica for Dribbble. Myriad’s too soft, looks a little too tight upcased, and the bold is too heavy, especially for numbers. Helvetica gives the site a cleaner feel. (I also generally find Myriad too wide–its semicondensed version is much better proportioned, and, happily, is now available on Typekit.)


  • # Dan Cederholm
    says on August 18

    Thanks for the suggestion, but it’s all very subjective. “Better” to you might mean something completely different to someone else.

    More importantly though, as mentioned above, only Mac users would benefit from your proposed stack. An alternative would be to use something like Typekit to serve Myriad Pro. But that then opens up thousands of other possibilities to serve fonts to a much wider audience (all platforms). We could that. But I’m happy with Helvetica.

    @Jamie I can assure you more than “minimal consideration” went into our typography decisions. Seems silly to have to defend the use of Helvetica 🙂


  • # Amrinder
    says on August 18

    @Dan: Nice to see you following up. Actually this is not just “better” for me but for lots of registered users at dribbble who attract non-registered users.

    More importantly though, as mentioned above, only Mac users would benefit from your proposed stack.

    Acrobat Reader 8 and Adobe CS3 comes for both Mac and Windows with which Myriad Pro comes bundled, so both type of users can benefit from it.

    An alternative would be to use something like Typekit to serve Myriad Pro.

    We need not serve every single user with Myriad Pro or Segoe UI; just like Helvetica Neue is not installed on every system. And, Dan just like you say “Websites need not look exactly same in every browser”, so fonts are part of websites.


  • # Dan Cederholm
    says on August 18

    Actually this is not just “better” for me but for lots of registered users at dribbble who attract non-registered users.

    You’re still assuming that Myriad Pro is better than Helvetica. But again, it’s completely subjective. You’ll get a different answer depending on who you ask.


  • # Amrinder
    says on August 19

    You are right, Dan. Every designer has different preferences. But I just wanted to stretch limits here by using a different font (like Myriad or Segoe). Since Helevtica is ubiquitous we should try different fonts and that’s the reason Typekit is there — to serve large variety of fonts over default Helvetica and Arial.