How did we end up with such a bad convention for font weights?

Is thin thinner than light? Is regular thinner than medium? Is medium or regular the default? Is semibold thicker than medium? Is heavy thicker than bold? What about black? Why is it even named like a color? What the fuck is going on? Just use freaking numbers!

0 should be the default.
Negative numbers should mean thinner and positive numbers should mean thicker.

Eric Gill was a colossal pervert, that might explain it.

Tailwind has a pretty neat system for their built-in colors (blue-50 being white-ish blue, blue-950 being blue-ish black). a similar system for font weight also exists but not a lot of devs use it afaik. https://w3schools.com/cssref/...

seeing things progress humanity seems to always get worse in terms of clarity and never better

sometimes some outlier comes in with dreams of a paradise and organizes everything and everyone hates them but they write some books that by circumstance survive and then we use those condensed systems hundreds or thousands of years later

but on the whole humans make everything worse and not better

@wojtek322 I like that color system. We need that for font weights!
The tailwind thing goes into the right direction.

The weights have numbers associated too: 400 is regular, bigger is bolder, less is thinner

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US...

> '0 should be the default.

Negative numbers should mean thinner and positive numbers should mean thicker.'.

...unless you're stuck w/ integers, for whatever reason. Then 0..255. Right?

@12bitfloat that might be true for css, but unfortunately not universally for any kind of UI framework

@12bitfloat still, the names are a mess of 3 different categories: Thickness, weight and color.

That's why we don't like designers. That's what happens when you give them a computer. Happy they're phased out.

The example with Tailwind tells you an instance where 0 as the neutral won't work, or at least won't be pretty - imagine dash-concatenating negative values to a colour name. Moreover people would argue if this exact weight should be the 0 or the other one.

If there was a way to standardise a unit of measurement for this, it would've been done by now. The 100-900 scale is unitless, it's not very self-descriptive, but IMO it's adequate once you get used to it.

@kamen yeah, it’s pretty good.