WendL.ie

Journal · · 2 min read

The dot nearly went missing

designtypography

The tools here are called page•pin, site•stay and tab•tally. The dot in the middle is not decoration. It is the naming rule, written down years ago and followed since: lowercase, two words, one dot.

To keep this site fast the typefaces are cut down before they ship. You keep the letters you use and throw away everything else — the Greek, the Cyrillic, the arrows, the fractions, the several thousand characters nobody on a small Irish website is ever going to type. A hundred and twenty kilobytes becomes fifteen. Everyone does it.

The standard recipe is to keep "latin". The dot is not in latin. It is punctuation, sitting off in another block entirely.

So the fonts would have shipped without it, and nothing would have gone wrong, exactly. The browser would have found the dot somewhere else — Arial, probably — and slotted it in. Every product name on the site would have had one character in a different typeface, at a slightly different weight, sitting a hair off the baseline. Not broken. Just slightly wrong, in the middle of the brand name, on every page.

I caught it because I had gone looking, not because anything told me. That is the part worth writing down. Nothing errors. No build fails. There is no red anywhere. The page loads and looks nearly right, and nearly right is the hardest kind of wrong to find, because your eye slides straight over it.

The dot is in the font now, along with the em dash, the euro sign and the curly apostrophes. There is a check that opens each cut file and confirms every one of them is present. It has never failed. I would rather it existed anyway.