Colophonics of the Redesign
Most WordPress blogs have, I contend, become too busy. There are too many sidebars, widgets and adverts; just too many bells and whistles generally.
The Ministry is not an exercise in making money and, as such, those bells and whistles have no place here.
I therefore wanted a minimalist, single-column theme that presented the content simply and clearly, with a horizontal menu across the top of each page for ease of navigation. I also wanted to keep the fuschia, white and grey on black look of the original dark.cash theme.
I am also, however, more than a little obsessed by fonts. I spent a long time researching fonts and combinations of fonts to get the look I wanted. I wanted a specific sans serif font for the title and headlines (Myriad Pro) and a specific serif font (Didot) for the body text.
However, the Web lets down site owners and designers when it comes to fonts. Unless the correct font is already installed on the computer that is accessing a site whose Cascading Style Sheet uses that font, then the operating system will simply replace that specified font with what it deems the nearest alternative. This is particularly a problem in Windows.
For example, Helvetica font is installed as standard on Macs but PCs substitute Helvetica with Arial, a font that comes as part of Windows. Arial may superficially look like Helvetica but there are significant – if subtle – differences between the two that make a noticeable difference. (You can read more about those differences here.)
While the launch version of the new theme looked great on my Mac – Myriad Pro and Didot everywhere I looked – I was horrified when I fired up a PC and found Arial and Times New Roman staring back at me: the Ministry looked like something off Geocities circa 1996.
Didot does not, sadly, come as standard on PCs. Times New Roman looks like shit. The thought of most visitors having to read my drivel in a font that’s even uglier than my prose was too much to bear.
I have therefore made a decision to go all sans serif.
Most modern computers – whether PC, Mac or Linux – have Myriad Pro on their system as the font comes bundled with versions of the free Adobe Reader software installed since January 2005 and the Ministry should therefore render correctly on most visitors’ screens.
If Myriad Pro is not available, the Ministry’s CSS code lists (in descending order) Optima, Gill Sans, Lucida Grande and Lucida Sans fonts as alternatives before plumping for the real generic sans serif typefaces of Verdana, Helvetica, Geneva, Arial and Trebuchet MS.
As things stand at the time of writing, the Ministry looks best of all in Safari on a Mac, where it displays thus:
However, the site also now renders more or less as I want it to in Safari on a PC, and in Firefox on both PC and Mac. (I’m still working on Opera, which for some reason is not picking up the font tree code.)
If the Ministry looks like shit in your browser, that’s probably because you’re using a shitty browser that doesn’t support web standards – almost certainly Internet Explorer. If you complain about this, I will laugh at you because I do not care. If, however, you are using a modern, standards-compliant browser and the site does not render in a decent sans serif typeface, or you have otherwise have trouble viewing or reading the site, please let me know.