A new font stack for the blog
I occasionally visit Bear blog's Discovery feed. It doesn't go unrewarded. Sometimes I find gems there. Like yesterday, when I found the blog post The three lines of CSS that saved me 40kb and might do the same for you. It introduced me to the site Modern Font Stacks.
I like to keep things simple. One of my key design goals for my blog is not to use fonts from an external site, like Google Fonts, etc. That's why I deliberately used the system font stack for my blog, so it doesn't have to fetch fonts from a third-party site.
And the Modern Font Stacks didn't make me change my mind, though. What it does is, in its site, it organizes the system font stack into different categories depending on the typeface. You've got categories like System UI, Transitional, Old Style, etc. The font-family is also there, so you can just copy it for the font stack you like.
After going through all the font stacks and thinking them through, I settled on the Humanist typeface font stack for my blog. I chose it because it uses a system font stack that is coherent across platforms. More importantly, this font stack fits my blog's persona for how I think of it: personal, warm, and at the same time direct and unpretentious.
Hopefully you're reading the blog in this typeface now (if I haven't changed the font stack again). Hope you like it. But more important than liking it is that the chosen font shouldn't distract you from the blog's content itself. Because I believe a good UI goes unnoticed, for it is simple and gets out of the way. It's so natural that you don't notice it particularly. It just blends in perfectly.
A blog's font is a part of its UI. The chosen font should be such that it shouldn't create discomfort for the users so much so that it gets in the way of reading the blog. The typeface, font size, line length, line gap, etc. should be such that all these together should make reading your blog, and any system's UI & UX in general, a great experience.
I don't know whether I've achieved that benchmark for my blog, but at least I tried hard not to make the reading experience bad. Hopefully I got it just right.