I’m trying out Alegreya as the regular text font on this website.

I’d been using Merriweather for a few years and I liked it okay, but occasionally something felt janky with the width and spacing between characters. I’ve wanted to try something else, but messing with fonts seemed like a distraction when I don’t do enough of the basic stuff here, like actually write things, or keep the home page and menu working properly.

However, seeing how excited this guy got about a cool font inspired me to start looking at fonts again. (One of the growing number of personal-ish websites I lurk follow via RSS, a topic for another time.) The font he geeked out about wasn’t the one for me, but I encountered the Novel font, tried out the demo on a local build of my site, and really got my heart set on using it. Eventually I came to terms with the reality that I can’t or shouldn’t spend that kind of money on a font for this little hobbyist website, though.

So, I pulled myself away from browsing Fonts In Use and artisan font foundries, went back to Google Fonts to settle on something I can afford. Some of the Google Fonts, such as Alegreya, do appear to have come from cool artisan font foundries, so at least there is that. I don’t think I open up my “indieweb” site to tracking and other garbage just by using Google Fonts, but I could be wrong. I’m using free services for almost every aspect of this website, so I’m likely compromised and beholden to all sorts of interests.

Headings remain IBM Plex Mono. I have a vague sense that this pairing of a mono heading with a serif is not ideal and wasn’t ideal with Merriweather, either. However, the probability that I’m breaking design rules and conventions is admittedly an energizing agent. There’s something in me that wants things to be purposefully off and ugly and wrong; part boredom with convention, and part fear of the inability to ever get it “right.” Maybe this isn’t off enough, though? Mainly I’m just weirdly committed to these precious mono headings, while I don’t want a sans font for my text because I just prefer serif fonts for printing or displaying text. So it is what it is. I can do whatever I want here, and I can always change it again, and, to quote my old favorite band’s blog quoting Jean Genet, “to achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.” These are individually good fonts, though, so is this cacophony in good taste? Power clashing? Or just sloppy, inelegant.