Today’s TMD: “White House Urges Boosters Ahead of Third COVID-19 Winter”
By Declan Garvey and Esther Eaton
MG: A side discussion broke out in comments at the Mother Ship yesterday concerning the fonts at the new digs. The site generally appears to use a serif font—with little widened flares at the ends of the letters, typical of traditional newspaper and book publishing. The main article at Substack comes in one of these “Times New Roman” style fonts.
The unadorned fonts as a family are “sans serif” and the titles of these posts along with the subheaders at Substack come in this one. The new site uses sans serif mainly in the bylines on articles, it appears, as well as some of the buttons under comments.
The lack of consistency in fonts seemed to annoy people most—those who pay attention to such details, at least. It does make the new site look less professional than it could.
The general consensus seems to be that serif fonts are easier on the eyes generally, and generally make reading smoother.
At last check, the Morning Dispatch and other Dispatch newsletters come to my email in sans serif fonts, but this may be due to an email client setting.
Thoughts?
Another one you may not have on the punch list: Duplicated comments. More of a plague than it used to be on Substack.
Marque, just in case you are adding to the punch list, here's one I mentioned on the Dispatch thread this morning, regarding the hearts always showing red:
- - - - - - - - - -
But then later, you may have forgotten that you gave it a like before, and if you give it another one, then you will see by the count that you have instead taken it away. Oops! That's why we need them to show red only to the person who gave them a like. Substack does this.
Part of the problem is that navigation is so messed up right now that you will run across the comment in question placed randomly so that you're less likely to remember you saw it before.