Please Stop “Fixing” Font Smoothing ⇥ usabilitypost.com

Dmitry Fadeyev:

So here is yet another plea for designers to stop “fixing” WebKit font smoothing by disabling subpixel rendering. Feel free to use it on light text on dark backgrounds, feel free to use it to fix custom font rendering on Windows or to style specific bits of text on the page to make it look more slender, but for main portions of text where readability is paramount please leave the default setting alone and let the operating system handle the smoothing.

Due to the way subpixel anti-aliasing works, it makes small light text on a dark background look really bold, and quite blurry (which is why the footer of this site has standard, non-subpixel antialiasing). But this is the only exception to this rule. For everything else, please use subpixel rendering. It makes the web more beautiful. Via everyone on Twitter today.