Wikipedia unveils font redesign
Wikipedia has rolled out a new look, but it will take a true fan to notice the "small but important" changes.
On its Twitter account Wikipedia on Thursday noted that readers "might have noticed some font changes on the sites."
A statement posted on the official Wikimedia blog claimed the updates aimed to make content more 'readable, consistent, available and accessible'.
Ahead of the implementation, in an interview with Fast Co last week, Wikimedia Director of User Experience Jared Zimmerman explained that the modifications to the site's typefaces, designed to make the pages more readable, would be very subtle, but highlight a bigger font issue worldwide.
According to Fast Co, the world's favorite encyclopedia's modification will cover a huge 32,533,899 pages in 287 languages, increasing the font size and differentiating main text and chapter header typefaces.
Wikipedia has previously used text styles which present issues at small sizes and in non-Latin scripts, with font families for body text and headings set to correspond with users' browser default sans-serif fonts.
"This haphazard set of defaults created a lot of readability issues that have not been consistently addressed, until now," Wikipedia states.
The brand's universality poses a problem in that no free typeface exists which can render every language in the world, and reader experiences could be totally different depending on the page's language and the user's internet browser.
However, the update should go some way to making its sites more consistent.
"This is bigger than just a change of typography on Wikipedia," Zimmerman told Fast Co. "It starts to point to [the question], why aren't there open-source typefaces with ubiquitous language support?"
Wikipedia's design has come under fire in the past for being aesthetically outdated. Earlier this year Swedish graphic design studio 1910 reimagined the layout of the internet's most popular open information source with its project ‘A Readable Wikipedia'.
For more information about the redesign, see the Wikimedia blog.
