Is Source Hans SC Light an appropriate font for corporate websites?

[Kenny同志]

My client, an Australian law firm, is proposing to use Source Hans SC Light for its Chinese website and asks me whether the font is appropriate.

 

From my experience, this font is not commonly used—I could be wrong though. If so, is it possible that it is not supported on some web browsers? Or could there be any other problems?

 

I would be immensely grateful if anyone who is familiar with such stuff could give me some feedback. Thanks.

 

[Demonic_Duck]

Assume you mean this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Han_Sans
 
Looks like it's part of the Noto font family. It should display fine if used as a web font (the font itself is embedded in the webpage). However, it may cause the page to load slowly, though I'm not sure how much of an issue that's likely to be (leave that to their web designers to figure out).
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_typography#Web_fonts
 
https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/guidelines/
 

For use in web content: it is very important to use the fonts as web fonts. When a font is only specified in CSS font-family but not really delivered to the client as a web font, the browser will automatically fall back to another font. Some Noto fonts are available at Google Web Fonts Early Access. However, sometimes, it doesn’t serve the latest version of Noto or provides a subset of a font. In addition, be aware that the web latency for large fonts, such as for Noto Sans CJK, can be large.

 

I can't comment too much on its aesthetic properties - looks neutral enough not to look out of place on a corporate website, but it doesn't strike me as particularly attractive.

[889]

You haven't mentioned whether this is for display or body type, or both. Perhaps this is well readable as body type, I don't know, but for display it's not particularly elegant.

[mikelove]

It's fine but not particularly attractive - also, Chinese webfonts are a bit fraught in general for people on slower internet connections (lots of extra data to download and commensurately a much longer site loading time).

 

Honestly for most applications I'd just specify the generic "sans-serif" in CSS - maybe if you want to be fancy you also include specific reference to .PingFang-SC for iOS/Mac and whatever its Windows equivalent is these days (Android system fonts vary by OEM so not much you can do on those without driving yourself crazy). Expectations for web typography among Chinese-speaking users remain quite low and I suspect you'll gain more from the faster loading time than you'll lose from the just-a-tiny-bit-less-homogenous cross-platform type design. (and frankly most of those system fonts - even on Android, at least for phones sold in China - are more attractive than Source Han Sans)

[Kenny同志]

Many thanks for your help, Duck, 889, and Mike. I appreciate it very much. : )

 

Given what you've said, the client may want to use an alternative font.