retro

System shock

2 months 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.