If you’re making a design for someone other than yourself or your client, use fonts that work in languages other than English. If you’re making a theme for public distribution, pick something that at least includes extended Latin, and preferably has a few other alphabets as well.
Hell, if you’re making a design just for yourself, use fonts that work in languages other than English. You can be the most monolingual American on earth, and the minute you copy/paste something that’s a little more worldly, all those accented characters will fail over to your fallback font. It looks awful. It looks unprofessional. And it looks like you haven’t considered any audience that isn’t just like you.
I wouldn’t call that a rant, I would call that pointing out what’s in front of me. :)
I think the issue is that we live in our own little world and are so focuses with pixel perfection, that we don’t “see” it.
I read Takashi Irie’s post, “Don’t let Lorem Ipsum decide the fonts used in your WordPress Themes” just a few weeks and had my aha moment. The pictures he uses are great for pointing our what’s wrong with some typefaces.
That’s a great link, and thanks for dropping it here. Takashi actually points out an even bigger problem, in that his bad (and distressingly popular!) example doesn’t even include most of the standard punctuation. If you’re picking a font for a logo or a poster or something like that, where you know you’ll only ever need certain characters, that’s one thing. But it’s crappy to your users to design for something like a CMS — where you know people will be using text you didn’t plan for, because that’s the whole point! — and neither test nor provide decent-looking fallbacks.
I think that’s the key point. Design isn’t just “how does this look?” It has to incorporate “how will this be used?” And (since we are talking about a CMS and not a poster) that has to include the assumption of someone else’s real content.