Why our civilization needs better typography in email and websites

It's no wonder people don't want to do a lot of reading on the web. Of course, LCD screens are bright and exhausting for the eyes to look into, and we'll go down as the generation who lost its eyesight and reading habits to those weird old monitors (the ones we use now, I mean) that couldn't have colour without glowing. We're just starting to see e-readers (and their great screens that you actually have to illuminate with a light or something), gaining popularity, but people still read their emails in their web browsers, on their computers, and we'll keep doing it for awhile.

That's why it'd be nice if Google did something about this:

That shouldn't be what my emails look like. I used to use Firefox for my emails just because it let me tell it to use fonts that I specify, so I could specify something nice. But that's a browser-wide setting that screws up every website, including gmail.

We need settings inside Gmail that let us say "look, I'm not into Arial as a paragraph font" - hey, it's a sound objection, from a typography theory standpoint.

I just want to sigh, because this comes from a problem that's been on the 'web for far too long: we are using sans-serif fonts for paragraphs because they used to look better on computers. And we're using point sizes that are too small. We as in web designers. Because it's hard to stand up to a creative director who doesn't ever have to read the text that they are making styling decisions about. I get that. But as designers, I feel like we have have an obligation to whip out a typography book here and there and say "look guys, let's think about readability." Not even legibility, but readability.

I don't even know what Hotmail looks like at this point, but if someone wants to link up a screenshot of what their email looks like, comment it up.