2023-12: New font for my Blog

What is Typography

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. Source

I must admit that the art of typography has always fascinated me. Considering that I find my personal handwriting really terrible, when I discovered that I could always type perfectly via a computer I was able to get something off my chest.

For simplicity’s sake, I will not delve completely into the concept of typography, but one thing I think is essential to understand is text typefaces.

A typeface (or font family) is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, bold), slope (e.g., italic), width (e.g., condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. Source

Let’s consider the following categories:

• Serifs: small features at the end of strokes within letters (typefaces without serifs are known as sans serif).
• Proportional: glyphs (e.g. letters) of varying widths, while a monospaced font uses a single standard width for all glyphs.

These are the typefaces that distinguish the glyphs I use on this site.

Selected Font: Iosevka

Iosevka is an open-source, sans-serif + slab-serif, monospace + quasi‑proportional typeface family, designed for writing code, using in terminals, and preparing technical documents. Website

Since I consider the content of this Blog to be primarily aimed at a fairly technical audience, I decided to use this typeface that has recently generated some traction in the IT community.

The Jekyll theme used to build this site is Minimal Mistakes, it offers a simple and effective style customization, even in font stacks declaration.

My only concern is how to serve Iosevka as a webfont, as I can see there are only two possible ways:

1. Host the webfonts in the same place as this site, impractical solution given non-negligible file size.
2. Finding someone who has had the same problem as me who has already found a solution.

Of course, I chose 2. Of the utmost importance, whenever I refer to a third party there are user privacy considerations to be made, and to assure my users maximum transparency I have analyzed GitHub’s privacy policy and updated the dedicated page.

Variants and customization

Iosevka Aile, and Iosevka Etoile, are quasi-proportional families made for documents and writing. Iosevka Curly is a sans-serif monospaced variant that i strangely like.

• Serif content: Iosevka Etoile
• Sans-Serif content: Iosevka Aile
• Monospaced content: Iosevka Curly

This very code snippet used to enable the theme customization is displayed with the Monospaced style:

$serif      : "Iosevka Etoile Web", serif;
$sans-serif : "Iosevka Aile Web", sans-serif;
$monospace  : "Iosevka Curly Web", monospace;

The future

Do I like this new style? Definitely! Will it always stay like this? We shall see!