I’ve removed Google Fonts from this site. The only exception is my résumé, for now, because I need a bit more control over the font so it prints cleanly as an A4 page.
There isn’t a particular reason for this, and was a hard decision. I like the service, and I like typography. Webfonts are hardly a monopoly. Privacy concerns are less than usual due to aggressive caching, although GDPR concerns remain. I guess the decreased page load times are nice.
At the end of the day, I could also self-host these fonts. Honestly though, that’s effort, and I’m not sure what the pay off is. Web typography varies wildly by device and platform, and I’m not an expert. And while projects like Google Fonts reduces some of that variance (ironically?), there are still enough issues to make web typography frustrating (italics and non-latin glyph support come to mind).
So realistically, the time I spend tweaking the fonts is largely specific to my devices and platforms. And although this blog is mainly written for my benefit1, with web design being what it is, I find myself using reader view more and more. It makes you appreciate plain design and content. If the design ended up closer to reader view by default, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.
It’s a way for me to document technical things, and I often refer back to my blog months later. The public format means I have to spend a bit of time writing it up, which I find clarifies some things. It has never had the classical web framework bloat super sophisticated design. ↩