Humanist font fallbacks #968
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If Fira Sans is the preferred font, a humanist sans serif, similar humanist sans serifs on OSs should be chose over a Grotesque like Helvetica and Arial. Seravek is available on macOS/iOS and Source Sans Pro is on Android. Other available options are (subjectively) far enough away from Fira Sans that it would be better to defer to the user agent and user settings than trying to shoehorn in Gill Sans or a common Linux font.
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Are these commonly installed fonts ? If the fallbacks are grotesque, what do you think of shortening the property to this ?
font-family: "Fira Sans", sans-serif;Note that we now ship the font files (#913) so they should load fine offline or behind adblockers.
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@Julow Also a good option! I am not sure on the design intent. If the intent is to have a Fira Sans because of humanist characterist, then common humanist fonts provide a better fallback for the design aesthetic in cases where the fonts fail to load or an obscurer/older browser isn’t supporting the supplied WOFF2 files. If there isn’t a strong reason for humanist/grotesteque/geometic, then falling back to the user agent is safer and more likely to either look native like the OS or have been overridden explicitly by users as their preferred default. What’s not ideal is getting a Grotesk like Arial as a fallback. |
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I've opened a PR implementing my suggestion: #1028 |
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Personally a bit partial to this one as falling back to other Humanist fonts is a bit more interesting than just falling back to the default, but I don’t have the strongest feeling other than removing Grotesk fonts. |
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I don't see why Humanist fonts are better fallbacks than user's chosen font (or chosen by the distro). I think the problem is the presence of a fallback. |
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I'm happy with falling back to the system defaults, so let's go with @Julow's approach. |
It’s a design thing. When a designer choose a font like Fira Sans, a humanist font, they could be making a statement that fallback fonts should fall under the similar font taxonomies. Many systems are using a Grotesk font as the default sans serif which can stray from designer intent. You could just say That’s not to say anything is wrong with falling back to the user agent’s |
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Thanks for the explanation! |
If Fira Sans is the preferred font, a humanist sans serif, similar humanist sans serifs on OSs should be chosen over a Grotesque like Helvetica and Arial. Seravek is available on macOS/iOS and Source Sans Pro is on Android. Other available options are (subjectively) far enough away from Fira Sans that it would be better to defer to the user agent and user settings than trying to shoehorn in Gill Sans or a common Linux font.