This is a quick little rant about Wired’s use of the font Ambroise Std Francois regular in their article titles. Ambrose Std Francois is essentially a dramatically condensed version of Ambroise, but more on that in a second. Here is an example of Ambroise Std Francois in action on a Wired article. Now, if you followed that link, you may have noticed what I do every time I load a story on Wired: for a split second, due to some web page loading wadggery that I don’t understand, the article title’s font appears not as Ambroise Std Francois, but instead as some uncondensed version of Ambroise. Here is a screenshot of that split-second, using the title text from the example above. Big difference.
Where this turns into a rant is with my opinion that all-caps Ambroise Std Francois regular is extremely painful to read. It somehow hurts my eyes and resists my normal reading process, forcing me to slow my reading waaaaay down. Meanwhile, the uncondensed font is so much easier to read that I can usually read the whole article title in the split-second that it’s visible. Inevitably, the loading process then snaps things back to Francois hell. So every time I open an article on Wired, it’s like the web site is taunting me with a better design option before forcing me to squint at super-condensed text in bitter disappointment.
Great design resource
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