System shock
a day ago
- Medium's design team experimented with using system fonts for their UI typography refresh.
- They included the CSS value 'system' as a future-proof entry in the font-family stack.
- After launch, users on Windows reported seeing a pixelated, retro font instead of modern system fonts.
- The culprit was the old Windows 3.0 bitmap font named 'System', still present in modern Windows for backward compatibility.
- The fix was simply removing the 'system' entry from the CSS font list.
- The author found the bug delightful, recreated the vintage font in vector format, and created a secret version of Medium to showcase the retro look.