I like web fonts. I dislike slow loading web pages. This has long been, and still is, a dilemma for me.
For some time I have enjoyed using Averia Serif Libre for this site.
Averia is a friendly and warm typeface that I think is easy to read. How the Averia font family came to be is also interesting. The only downside in my eyes is that the font file size unfortunately is a bit on the heavy side.
Since many browsers don’t display any text before the specified font is loaded, a slow connection can result in a long wait until the actual reading can begin. Not a great user experience at all times, but for the most part I thought it was worth it. Until a tweet from Ian Feather tipped the scale to the other side:
Web fonts are the worst thing to happen to Web Performance. That, and the notion that FOUT is unacceptable.
This is the reason why kihlstrom.com now uses Georgia instead. And by Georgia I mean a CSS font stack that looks like this:
font-family:
Georgia,
'New Century Schoolbook',
'Nimbus Roman No9 L',
serif;Until next time.