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Chris Messina

Font Shaming - Which fonts do top 737 ProductHunt startups use?

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We scraped the top hunts. Which fonts and font combinations do they use?

Conclusions:

* Lots of system fonts

* Lots of Google Fonts

* A long tail of the misspelled fonts

* Shockingly, no Comic Sans!

Finally, some websites use Helvetica and Arial on the same page which raises the question of *font shaming*, a term coined by @tylerlastovich

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Mattthew Mattthew
I love this concept! Unfortunately, this data is simply wrong. I was surprised to see the obscure and monospace typeface "Menlo" in the #2 spot, and the not available to license typeface "Segoe UI" in the #5 spot. So I checked myself: Menlo: 11 of the 12 websites cited do not use it on their homepage. On the one homepage where it's used, it only has the niche application of representing sample code. I don't have time to check every page, but very likely it's only used for that purpose. Segoe UI: Not visible anywhere on any of the websites cited, unless the visitor happens to be using Windows Vista OS (0.4%). I could only find it in the CSS of the homepage of 2 of the 12 websites. In those 2 cases, it's used as a backup font to the "System UI" font. This means means that it will only be visible where it is the System UI font, i.e. Windows Vista OS. This is a great idea, and I would love to see it take into account the actual visibility of the font, e.g. weighting character count, font-size, and use on homepages vs deeper pages.
Ivan Braun
Maker
@mattthew Matthew, accepted. We checked it internally, and found out it's much less precise than we thought. The reason is we scan the CSS and not HTML. Therefore, we count the CSS properties that are not used or redefined, thus users don't see them. Will rework it and let you know here. Thank you for your investigation. You're our whistleblower and, in short, our hero.
Ivan Braun
Maker
@mattthew Hi Matthew, as promised, we've reworked the fonts page https://icons8.com/fonts. We have manually checked all those websites with Font Ninja extension, collected new data, and pushed changes this week. There is still a small problem though. Because in some cases Font Ninja shows fonts that are not used, for example, we noticed this issue with Arial. At the moment the data is more close to the real picture, but there can be inaccuracies.
Mattthew Mattthew
@visualpharm super cool!
Eric Quinn Hargrove
Awesome work Icons8 Team. This is super cool!
Ivan Braun
Maker
@ericqhargrove thank you, Eric!
Zara Namalyan
Cool idea!
Ivan Braun
Maker
@zara_namalyan thank you :) We almost cancelled the project after we saw no cool, inspirational font pairings; then we had to pivot it.
Vardan Karapetyan
I find this amazing!
Ivan Braun
Maker
@vardankarapetyan oh boy, you know how to motivate.
Brik De Maeyer
Again great work Icons8 teams! ps I've receive an error modal when I was clicking on the fonts
Ivan Braun
Maker
@brik_dm can't reproduce :( we've restarted the services though recently, our bad
Rebecca Campany
@brik_dm @visualpharm It does not seem to be working today.
Ivan Braun
Maker
@tylerlastovich raises a question of *font shaming*. There are the respectable websites that use Arial and Helvetica on the same page. Should we judge them? You encourage you to analyze the scraped data on your own. Here it is: https://icons8.com/fonts/stats
Vlad Korobov
@tylerlastovich @visualpharm can not open the page.... probably to many visits. Curious
Ivan Braun
Maker
@tylerlastovich @vladkorobov confirmed, looking into...
Ivan Braun
Maker
Vlad Korobov
Ivan Braun
Maker
Anna Martirosyan
Great idea!
Ivan Braun
Maker
@anna_martirosyan oh thank you! It used to be a test task for our new team member btw
Hayden Mills
Great work everyone! This is dope.
Ivan Braun
Maker
@haydmills oh thanks. It's great to hear from someone like you. Love Fontpair!
Valeri Potchekailov
Great stuff guys!
Ivan Braun
Maker
@valeripotchekailov thank you, buddy!
Antoine Legendre
Really nice! How to add our site?
Ivan Braun
Maker
@thegendre you're supposed to be in top 1000 websites here at ProductHunt (and don't link directly to the app store or something like that — we excluded the websites like this)
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