What this is actually saying is don't use Garamond for copy text as its not designed for current DPI's that are currently used on monitors. It doesn't mean you can't use it for titles or headings or devices with a high DPI.
If you like what you see here, please consider voting for my SXSW panel. I'll be covering this and more, including proportion and color: <a href="http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/6261" rel="nofollow">http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/6261</a>
The article mentions Google Font API and Typekit as sources of fonts online, but there's another option that's worth looking at: The Open Font Library (<a href="http://openfontlibrary.org/" rel="nofollow">http://openfontlibrary.org/</a>)<p>The fonts hosted there are free (both as in beer and as in freedom). It's interesting to see how they apply the concepts around free software to another medium, like fonts.
Anyone who is using 12 <i>px</i> font in body text should be butchered imho. For reference 12 pt is approx 17 pixels in 100 PPI, and I think that even it is bit small for body text in web.<p>Also, desktop display tech needs to advance. But meanwhile, yes, please test your font selections with different software and preferably hardware, and ensure that it stays readable. I think all these new tech allowing fancy typefaces has produced at least twice as many horribly unreadable sites than those it has improved.
While we're on subject, I wanted to note that Helvetica makes a terrible body font. Please use Arial instead for your body, as it renders more clearly and reserve Helvetica for text above 13pt.<p>KISSmetric uses Helvetica and a matching bg shadow blur for all of their body text, which makes my eyes bleed. Horrible practice. Avoid text-shadow for body.
The first line in my userContent.css is:<p><pre><code> * {
font-family: helvetica !important;
font-size: 18px !important;
text-decoration: none !important;
line-height: 105% !important;
}
</code></pre>
This has really kept me from bothering which fonts look bad on the screen and why. For years. I would love to have a few basic, classic fonts used on my display but currently a carefully selected sans-serif font such as Helvetica is required for pleasurable web experience. Times and Garamond come to mind, I love them on print.<p>The Helvetica I have is actually a real Helvetica that I grabbed from some odd place several odd years ago and stashed for my personal use.
The irony is that the font used in this article actually renders to be really unattractive on my Windows machine at work. I've always noticed that they use this font at BusinessWeek online, and it's always bugged me, personally. It looks like someone took a notch out of each of the letters or something. It looks a lot better on my Mac. Screenshot on Windows: <a href="http://imgur.com/hWzXN.png" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/hWzXN.png</a>