Helvetica, gone

As much as a I liked the design by Rob Krijgsman of the Code Culture logo and style, I was never really keen on the use of Helvetica as the body typeset. Reading this smashing article convinced me to make some changes to the typography of the site. Helvetica seems really stern, and I could really do with a slightly more vivid font. A sans-serif which has a serious tone but which is less formal than Helvetica. This concerns both title and body fonts. Problem is the Code Culture font itself, Avenir, is only installed on about 5,5% of all Macs and next to none on Windows and Linux systems. So I've adopted some pretty long font stacks, and I'm looking I've looked into Google webfont replacements or just paying for a license so I can include Avenir as an @font-face type on a website. For the time being I've adopted Calibri as my primary body font, and Avenir as my primary title font. As a nice sidenote, the city of Amsterdam has adopted Avenir as their type of choice as well. And to provide a common @font-face fallback I've thrown Droid Sans into the mix.

Here are the stacks:

  • font-family: font-family: "Avenir Next", Avenir, "Droid Sans", "DroidSansRegular", Corbel, Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif; (title)
  • font-family: Calibri, "Droid Sans", "DroidSansRegular", "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; (body)

Now, especially since I didn't force the new fonts via an @font-face rule or some other method, I'm really curious if the new fonts render properly on your machines. So feel free to leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments section below.

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