smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

The previous blockquote highlight, a large and black-striped box, seemed altogether too ‘heavy’ for the (currently) more minimalist design in use.

The problem in selecting a replacement was two-fold. I wanted an oblique style, that translated well across both the Mac and Windows platforms, that also managed to avoid font jaggies, something Windows users are typically faced with in many italicised fonts. Normally it’s one, or the other.

For example, Garamond renders quite beautifully on a Mac. It’s a little less so under Windows, particularly if in italics, although it’s certainly not vulgar. I find I use it more often than I once did.

I’d never actually stopped long to look at common Windows fonts, in italicised form, at least until today. Few do. It’s a horrible experience.

As I cycled through fonts¹ using a few short phrases as mock text, and becoming increasingly despondent as time dragged on, I noted something odd.

The typeface Palatino rolled into the selector in the form of Palatino Linotype. Where were the jagged edges, the horrible malformed characters?

Emboldened by my discovery I decided to investigate a little further.

Palatino is an old style serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf at the German branch of Linotype. It was released in 1948 by the Linotype foundry.

In a stroke of pure unadulterated dumb luck I’ve stumbled on one of the few typically used typefaces that look just as stunning on a PC, as they do on a Mac. Including italics.

Random chance can be a surprisingly beautiful thing. Even on a PC.

1. I still have the neck-pain from cringing (↩)

Bill Israel notes a salient point about
grid-based design:
I, admittedly, have a soft-spot for the clean, crisp look a grid-based layout provides, and grids can be an excellent way to lay out visually pleasing information, but do all these layouts1 have to look so similar?
There-in lies the inevitable conundrum regarding grid-based content.
At a […]