Blog by Paul Lukas-style web writer Matt Haughey? No: a personal blog of Ben Zimmer-style wordplay and design curiosities, with typography quizzes and visual experiments.
HN links it for the Helvetica vs. Arial quiz and the "Ow My Eyes" experiment, plus its collection of Economist headlines.
{Arial) It's just a bad copy of Helvetica - a really bad one. It's just ugly.
The author mixes personal preference whilst aiming to clarify technically which I am not very fond of.
As a designer, if there's anything I learnt, all this doesn't matter. These are basically tools. A good designer will make even the stupidest font (if such a thing exists!) look beautiful. A bad designer will make bad designs no matter what. Remember, a lazy carpenter will always blame his tools. Sure, good fonts give you that extra 'edge'. But remember, right now we don't have a very good way of displaying custom fonts over the web without some kind of Javascript hack or increasing the page loading time by directly loading the font file and/or without having alignment issues across various browsers.
Also, there are uneven artificats rendered across font edges in some browsers which only worsens the User experience of using a custom font. Thus you'd be much much better off using arial or the likes of it.
Upon reading the author's article you might be convinced that one font is better than the other, but given the time, I can lead you on an infinite loop comparing various fonts side by side saying something is better than Helvetica and something else is better than this something, and so on. The real fact is, when you read content, the font doesn't matter much unless it is pretty bad. So if you read a lengthy article on a blog and if I just asked you what font it was, I'm sure you wouldn't have…
I find Arial slightly discomforting, because the kerning is not as nice as with Helvetica. Helvetica feels "denser".
But more to the point, for a corporate logo, Arial feels like a cheap knock off to the more polished Helvetica. You can see this yourself, by looking at corporate existing corporate logos designed in helvetica and then redesigned in Arial.
https://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/
Admittedly this is personal preference in the end, but I feel like if HR is going to give someone bad news, they're going to do it in Arial. If Apple is going to release a life changing technology, they're going to do it in Helvetica.
It is a bit ironic that the website has white text on black background which is no-no on screens as the very high contrast creates ghosting and eye strain / hurt for many people. Carefully read the text, then look at anywhere else and you'll see ghost lines everywhere for a few minutes. So the text should at least be gray-ish to decrease the contrast if you want to go that way. This works pretty well on paper, but sucks on screen.
Whenever I see such content, I send them this link which demonstrates the issue in a fun way: https://www.ironicsans.com/owmyeyes/
There's some design inexperience going on. #FFF text on #000 background for starters [0]. Images of text used as a background for content text is an unusual choice. The #FF0000 red underlines for links look a lot like spellcheck highlighting. Storing still images as .gif can be a lack of experience thing, as in not knowing what default to select after drawing red squares over sensitive information, or not knowing to avoid image types that support layers.
[0] https://ironicsans.com/owmyeyes/
> The human eye sees light. So reading illuminated text on a dark background is generally easier.
The scientific literature on readability does not back this up. Results show large individual variability with a small overall preference for dark-on-light.
Some old papers cited here: https://www.joedolson.com/2006/08/on-the-readability-of-inverted-color-schemes/
EDIT: Also here is a good example of how reading white on black is hard: http://www.ironicsans.com/owmyeyes/
I had a free weekend, and the thsrs idea by Ironic Sans [1] looked like something too cool to let it go (and http://thsrs.com/ didn't work too well for me). Also, it was a chance to implement my very own instant search ;-)
The thing is done in Django+PostgreSQL+jQueryUI and uses the Wordnet 2.0 thesaurus which comes with OpenOffice. My wife was kind enough to make it look not ugly.
[1] http://www.ironicsans.com/2008/07/idea_thsrs_the_shorter_thesaurus.html