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Comic Sans = bad reception from designers
I did a search on Balsamiq Mockups and Comic Sans before starting this discussion thread up, and found an extremely informative post from you, Peldi:
http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=235
I did not have a bad reaction to Comic Sans, personally, but *every* designer I showed some mockups to had the first initial reaction: "Oh god, its Comic Sans". I had to spend a few minutes convincing them to look at the rest of the page!
I was wondering if any additional thought had gone into this since the blog post? The "Use System Font" option from the menus appears to get me Arial, which is a start. I have a number of other fonts from other projects which might fit the need for me, but I can't see how I might select a different system font. It also seems to remove the bold option.
http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=235
I did not have a bad reaction to Comic Sans, personally, but *every* designer I showed some mockups to had the first initial reaction: "Oh god, its Comic Sans". I had to spend a few minutes convincing them to look at the rest of the page!
I was wondering if any additional thought had gone into this since the blog post? The "Use System Font" option from the menus appears to get me Arial, which is a start. I have a number of other fonts from other projects which might fit the need for me, but I can't see how I might select a different system font. It also seems to remove the bold option.
I’m happy, just giving some feedback
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Inappropriate?Hey Adam, thanks for the feedback. Nothing has happened since that blog post, but your feedback got me thinking. What if I replaced the "Use System Fonts" toggle with a "Choose Font..." dialog that looked like this?
This setting would be remembered for all mockups (in other words, it's tied to your machine, not the mockup file), so if you send someone a BMML file, it will show up in the font of their choosing. I like this because I don't have to worry about font licensing this way, you only use fonts you have already installed.
Thoughts?
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Inappropriate?I really like that idea, but I'd go one step further and put the font information in the mockup. If I have the font, it uses it, otherwise, it falls back to the application's default. That is a pretty standard model and, generally, if I want to use a specific font in my company, I can arrange to make sure everybody has the same font.
I’m fantabulous.
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Inappropriate?That would work for my needs. A systemwide setting would be helpful because I would not have to set it for each new mockup.
You may have a problem with the idea of "it will show up in the font of their choosing", however. Each font has unique letter widths, kerning, etc, so something that looks great in Arial Narrow would be way too wide in many other fonts and may not display correctly when the next user opens it. The option of asking the user what font they want to use when they open a BMML with a custom font set sounds too complex, however.
You may want to store the font that the BMML was created with in the file for future use, but not act on it at the moment. I would much prefer the systemwide option sooner rather than a perfect feature later - I can always tell others to use a specific font if it is very important.
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Inappropriate?OK, one last question: how important is this to you guys? In other words, should I stop working on the Image Upload feature to add this in? I also had "Print natively from the app" on the list as the next big feature to add. Could this be third?
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Inappropriate?As users, we of course want everything done as the top priority! :)
I would personally rank those three items this way:
- Image Upload - This is so important to allow for controls and concepts that the program does not currently have, as well as customer logos.
- Font Chooser - Fix the font so the designers stop yelling at me
- Native Printing - I am assuming it would still print a "bitmap" version of the mockup. If it somehow printed a version that was not pixelated like the PNG, I would rank this ahead of the font chooser. Native printing seems most helpful once you get the concept of a "collection" of mockups implemented, so we can print all of them at once.
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Inappropriate?OK, I'll go with that...this shouldn't take more than a day, so Print can wait a little... :)
I’m thankful
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Inappropriate?Hi all, I was able to work on this some this afternoon. I changed the design a little, the menu is now called "Change Default Font...". It works like this: every BMML will from now on contain a fontFamily and fontSize attributes. On open, the font is read from there (I have smart fallbacks for older files). If you have the font on your system, it's used, otherwise your default font is used (the one you choose in the dialog). Anyways, this is all totally transparent, hopefully the system "just works like you'd expect", without you even having to know about any of this.
You can test a first build of the new functionality here: http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mock... - usual warnings apply.
One thing this messed up is the bold text of mockups, which was something I had to deal with anyways (I'll add a "B" toggle button to the text styles where appropriate). That comes later tonight!
Overall, I like it, though I was never convinced of the need for this.
This better bring more sales in from you designer types! ;)
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Inappropriate?OMG - This is great. What was the font face that so many people voted here on. What is Architect? I would like to try and install that font and see what it looks like. -
Inappropriate?It was Architect Small Block: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=235
Also, I just added the bold toggle back into the app. New build coming right up. -
Inappropriate?Hi everyone. I discovered something else and started another topic about this: http://getsatisfaction.com/balsamiq/t... - I need your input!
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