Arguing over fonts: A typeface tragedy at VPN news
“Serif and Circumstance as Developers Battle Hacks Over Helvetica” It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the time the entire VPN…
“Serif and Circumstance as Developers Battle Hacks Over Helvetica”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the time the entire VPN News editorial team found itself embroiled in a bitter, internecine war with its own developers over, yes, really fonts.
Somewhere between the collapse of legal aid and the rising tide of state surveillance, the good folk at www.vpnnews.co.uk decided it was finally time to revamp the site. A noble endeavour, one might think, particularly for an organisation supposedly devoted to shedding light on injustice, government overreach, and the occasional knife crime story.
Unfortunately, in their rush to drag the website out of the late 90s and into something resembling modernity (read: fewer PDFs, more GDPR pop ups), no one anticipated that the most protracted, vindictive, and ideologically intractable skirmish would not be with a libel lawyer, a retired High Court judge or even Ofcom, but with their own front-end developer over the correct use of Times New Roman.
A John and Somesh, developers, who clearly spend more time communing with React components than actual humans, suggested, nay, insisted, that the site should abandon its current WIX “dated” look in favour of a clean, minimalist design “optimised for accessibility and engagement.” Which, translated into English, meant white space, fewer words, sans serif fonts and heven forbid, dark mode.
Enter the editor in chief, Ben, a world-weary journalist who may have survived everything from Fleet Street closures to Leveson. The sort person who still believes subeditors should wear ties and that a story isn’t ready until it has been printed, cut out, and annotated in red biro by a man called Joe.
Jay in the West Midlands, recently freed from the opium den that is a daily court listing, reportedly muttered, “If you make me publish Supreme Court rulings in Arial, I’ll resign.” This was taken as a joke. It wasn’t.
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“The Font of All Evil”
What followed was a scene reminiscent of the Treaty of Versailles, but with more sarcasm and less chance of long term peace.
There were debates, heated ones, over line height. Columns. Kerning. “How dare you touch our em dashes?” hissed one reporter, as if the punctuation were somehow unionised. The dev team, to their credit, tried to explain that using 14 different fonts on one page was perhaps not “good practice” and might in fact be the cause of the site’s notoriously slow load times, not to mention the minor issue of every article looking like it was laid out by someone in the throes of an existential crisis.
At one point, someone earnestly suggested bringing in a brand consultant. This went down about as well as Jeremy Corbyn at a BAE Systems AGM. The editor-in-chief, (aka Ben) with the haunted look of someone who has edited three knife crime trials before breakfast, was heard whispering: “A brand is something you burn into cattle.”
Design by Committee: The Fontline Battle Rages
The proposed style guide from the developers included such controversial lines as:
This was considered, in the words of one journalist, “a Stalinist purge of typographic diversity.” Others agreed. Within days, an underground faction had formed within the editorial team, calling themselves the Serif Liberation Front. Their manifesto? “No news in Calibri.”
Meanwhile, the developers retaliated with passive aggressive Git commits. One simply read: “Replaced curly quotes with straight ones because we’re not writing love letters in 1867.”
Tensions rose. Someone tried to calm things down by suggesting a neutral compromise: Georgia. A middle ground font, elegant but modern. But by then it was too late. A junior reporter, misinterpreting the suggestion, began researching a piece on the US state’s voter suppression laws.
All the Wrong Types
As the redesign faltered, so did morale. Whats App began to fill with cryptic messages like “Helvetica is the enemy of democracy” and “No justice without justified margins.” A contributor accidentally uploaded an entire interview transcript in Comic Sans as a protest. It had to be taken down after complaints from blind readers.
The site’s long suffering UX designer Somesh, caught between the twin firestorms of aesthetic purity and editorial authority, eventually entered a meditative state. He was last seen staring at a CSS file, muttering “line height is a social construct.”
To make matters worse, management attempted to “de escalate” the row with a team building day involving archery. This ended in several near misses, a formal HR complaint, and one developer announcing they were “going fully remote, in Peru.”
Quotes from the Battlefield
For balance, VPN News attempted to interview key participants. Here are some extracts:
Type-Facedown
The war reached its lowest point when someone, anonymous, but clearly literate in both Python and passive aggression added a note to the homepage footer reading: “This site is best viewed by people with no taste.”
As of writing, the site remains in a sort of Cold War limbo, somewhere between Bootstrap v5 and post traumatic font disorder. A temporary fix was installed. Helvetica for headlines. Georgia for body text. Drop caps reinstated, but only for articles longer than 800 words. No Comic Sans, except under extreme provocation.
Lammie has retreated into his dark corner of the internet, nursing pints of artisan coffee and muttering about “breaking the build.” The editors have returned to the comforting embrace of their manual stylebook, still suspicious of anything ending in .js.
And the Moral of the Story?
In an age where newsrooms are expected to be everything from social media empires to AI whisperers, the sad truth is that even the most righteous of platforms can be brought to its knees by a single argument over a typeface.
No government interference. No court injunction. Just a minor civil war over whether body copy should be justified or ragged right.
As we go to press, VPN News remains online. Just. But one wonders whether any of this energy might have been better spent publishing news about, say, the ongoing collapse of legal aid, the criminal justice backlog, the latest attempt to outsource judicial reviews to a management consultancy or knife crime.
But never mind. The heading is 24pt Roboto now. So at least that’s justice done.
Next week: “404 Not Found, the Journey of a Missing Journalist Bio Page.”
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