Soma Design

When Tim Brown released v2 of the Web Font Spec­i­men (WFS) a few weeks back, he hon­oured me by ask­ing for my feed­back a cou­ple of days before releas­ing it to the world. I had a cou­ple of sug­ges­tions that he took into con­sid­er­a­tion but ulti­mate­ly decid­ed to leave aside. Since he licensed WFS with Cre­ative Com­mons, I decid­ed to make my own vari­ant using my ini­tial suggestions.

The three changes I’ve made are fair­ly small and revolve around the Body Size Com­par­i­son sec­tion of four fonts. I’ve sub­sti­tut­ed Ver­dana for Tim’s choice of Times New Roman, as Times is rarely used on the web. Ver­dana, on the oth­er hand, is prob­a­bly the most wide­ly used and most read­able web font of all.

To fur­ther aid in this com­par­i­son, I’ve shift­ed the spec­i­men’s font to the right one posi­tion. It now has Geor­gia on its left, and Ver­dana on its right, with Ari­al tak­ing the far right posi­tion. This way, whether you’re test­ing a serif or sans with­in WFS, your font is always adja­cent to both its style mate and com­ple­ment for easy com­pare and contrast.

Final­ly, I’ve added a para­graph set in each of the four fonts beneath the com­par­i­son sec­tion. The whole point of eval­u­at­ing web type is to ensure that it is leg­i­ble, suitable—and don’t for­get beautiful—when set in the brows­er. Now you can com­pare how well your font works in para­graph form against these three web stalwarts.

And, just as you can use Font­Friend with the WFS, you can use it with the Soma WFS.

Enough with the chit-chat. View the orig­nal. View the Soma WFS. Or, grab the [Down­load not found] zip. Go make beau­ti­ful type on the web.