It started innocently

I needed a font. One font. For the display text on a personal blog. This should take fifteen minutes.

It took three days.

The criteria (which kept changing)

My initial criteria were simple: legible, has personality, not Inter. By day two the list had expanded to include “feels slightly editorial without being pretentious,” “works at 18px and 64px,” “has good zero vs. capital-O differentiation,” and “does not remind me of a SaaS landing page from 2019.”

Every font reminded me of a SaaS landing page from 2019.

The Google Fonts spiral

The problem with Google Fonts is that there are 1,500 fonts and approximately 900 of them look identical. The other 600 are novelty fonts that look great in a screenshot and terrible in a paragraph.

I made a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet had columns for weight range, x-height, personality (subjective, scale of 1–5), and a “vibes” column that just had emoji in it.

My partner asked what I was doing. I said “typography research.” She left the room.

Zen Maru Gothic

I ended up with Zen Maru Gothic — a Japanese rounded gothic that has this quality I can only describe as deliberate softness. The terminals are rounded without being bubble-letter. The CJK glyphs are absolutely beautiful. It pairs surprisingly well with JetBrains Mono for code.

The catch: it only has one weight. You get Medium and that’s it.

For a while I thought this was a dealbreaker. Then I realized that if I’m reaching for font-weight as a design tool more than twice per page, I’m probably using it as a crutch.

What I actually learned

  1. The font matters less than you think, once you’re past “not terrible.” The difference between your 4th choice and your 12th choice is invisible to anyone who isn’t you.

  2. x-height is the thing. Fonts with high x-heights feel modern and readable at small sizes. Low x-heights feel elegant and cramped simultaneously.

  3. Always test at actual size. Screenshots at 2x make every font look better than it is.

  4. Rounded fonts age faster. They feel warm and friendly in 2024 and potentially dated by 2027. I’m choosing to not care about this.

The real lesson

The real lesson is that I will always find a way to spend three days on something that should take fifteen minutes, and I will always feel it was time well spent, and I will always be slightly wrong about that.

The font looks good though.