Fonts 2025

[nrllh]

Fonts 2025

If you're interested in contributing to the Fonts chapter of the 2025 Web Almanac, please reply to this issue and indicate which role or roles best fit your interest and availability: author, reviewer, analyst, and/or editor. You can find more details about this year’s Call for Contributions here.

💬 Please make sure to join #web-almanac-fonts on Slack for team coordination.

Content team

Lead	Authors	Reviewers	Analysts	Editors	Coordinator
@charlesberret	@charlesberret	@bramstein @svgeesus @jmsole @RoelN	@IvanUkhov	-	@turban1988

Expand for more information about each role 👀

• The content team lead is the chapter owner and responsible for setting the scope of the chapter and managing contributors' day-to-day progress.
• Authors are subject matter experts and lead the content direction for each chapter. Chapters typically have one or two authors. Authors are responsible for planning the outline of the chapter, analyzing stats and trends, and writing the annual report.
• Reviewers are also subject matter experts and assist authors with technical reviews during the planning, analyzing, and writing phases.
• Analysts are responsible for researching the stats and trends used throughout the Almanac. Analysts work closely with authors and reviewers during the planning phase to give direction on the types of stats that are possible from the dataset, and during the analyzing/writing phases to ensure that the stats are used correctly.
• Editors are technical writers who have a penchant for both technical and non-technical content correctness. Editors have a mastery of the English language and work closely with authors to help wordsmith content and ensure that everything fits together as a cohesive unit.
• The section coordinator is the overall owner for all chapters within a section like "User Experience" or "Page Content" and helps to keep each chapter on schedule.

Note: The time commitment for each role varies by the chapter's scope and complexity as well as the number of contributors.

For an overview of how the roles work together at each phase of the project, see the Chapter Lifecycle doc.

Milestone checklist

0. Form the content team

• [x] 📆 May 18 Complete program and content committee - 🔑 Organizing committee
  • The content team has at least one author, reviewer, and analyst.

1. Plan content

• [x] 📆 June 1 First meeting to outline the chapter contents - 🔑 Content team
  • The content team has completed the chapter outline.

2. Gather data

• [ ] 📆 July 1 Custom metrics completed - 🔑 Analysts
  • Analysts have added all necessary custom metrics and drafted a PR (example) to track query progress.
• [ ] 📆 July 1 HTTP Archive Crawl - 🔑 HA Team
  • HTTP Archive runs the June crawl.

3. Validate results

• [ ] 📆 September 1 Query Metrics & Save Results - 🔑 Analysts
  • Analysts have queried all metrics and saved the output.

4. Draft content

• [ ] 📆 October 1 First Draft of Chapter - 🔑 Authors
  • Authors has written the chapter.
• [ ] 📆 October 20 Review & Edit Chapter - 🔑 Reviewers & Editors
  • Reviewers and Editors has processed the the chapter.

5. Publication

• [ ] 📆 November 15 Chapter Publication (Markdown & PR) - 🔑 Authors
  • Authors has converted the chapter to markdown and drafted a PR.
• [ ] 📆 December 1 Launch of 2025 Web Almanac 🚀 - 🔑 Organizing committee

6. Live Stream

• [ ] 📆 December 15 Live Stream - 🔑 Content Team

Chapter resources

Refer to these 2025 fonts resources throughout the content creation process:

• 📄 Planning doc for outlining and drafting content
• 📊 Results sheet for saving the results of queries
• 📝 Markdown file for publishing content and managing public metadata
• 🔍 SQL files for committing the queries used during analysis
• 💬 #web-almanac-fonts on Slack for team coordination

[bramstein]

I unfortunately don't have time to author this year, but I would be happy to be a reviewer.

[turban1988]

I unfortunately don't have time to author this year, but I would be happy to be a reviewer.

Awesome! Thanks for volunteering to be a reviewer this year. Your efforts do not go unnoticed!

[svgeesus]

Happy to be a reviewer

[turban1988]

Happy to be a reviewer

Great! Thanks.

[charlesberret]

I'd be happy to author again this year!

[turban1988]

I'd be happy to author again this year!

Thanks @charlesberret !

[turban1988]

@jmsole @alexnj @RoelN @IvanUkhov @drott are you interested in contributing to this year's chapter?

[IvanUkhov]

I can help with the queries!

[turban1988]

Great to have you on board, @IvanUkhov

[jmsole]

@turban1988 I'd be happy to be a reviewer again this year.

[RoelN]

I'm still a little embarrassed about not being able to make time last year 😅 I'd love to review, though.

I'm very curious to see if things changed much since last year. I hope this year's article won't be roughly the same but with a few numbers changed.

[svgeesus]

It would require coordination with the Security chapter authors, but it would be worth commenting on the use of Content Security Policy font-src usage, over time (10-11%, in 2024), plus a reminder to actually set this to prevent font-based security attacks.

Security chapter is already tracking this in general, but the Fonts chapter should comment on this specific header.

[turban1988]

We currently have quite a decent number of reviewers. It would be great to also add some authors and analysis :)

[nrllh]

@charlesberret since you were the only author, I've assigned you as the lead for this chapter - hope that’s okay.

[charlesberret]

@nrllh sure, I'd be happy to take the lead for this year's "Fonts" chapter, but echoing @turban1988 it would be great if some of the reviewers could pitch in with a bit of writing or analysis too :)

[turban1988]

@bramstein @svgeesus @jmsole @RoelN @IvanUkhov Do you have the capacity to support @charlesberret a little bit? This could be, for example, by brainstorming, the content would be suitable for this chapter.

[nrllh]

@charlesberret, could you please try to schedule a meeting with the content team to draft this year's outline?

[bramstein]

@charlesberret I left a proposal for an outline in the Google Doc, but feel free to change it.

[charlesberret]

thanks @bramstein!

[turban1988]

Hey guys, I quickly wanted to check in on the status of this chapter. Can we assist you in any way?

[IvanUkhov]

Well, we have been waiting for the final data, and it seems like the crawler finished a few days ago.

[svgeesus]

I had a look at the spreadsheet but can't tell whether the following question can be answered from that data:

What percentage of sites specify a font which is

• not a generic font family
• not a webfont

The use of installed (often, user-installed) fonts is a topic of hot debate currently. Privacy-focused people want to prevent it (because of fingerprinting) and I18n-focused folks want to (continue to) allow it because of minority languages and the historical backlog of pages which would suddenly stop working.

We know that around 85% of pages are using webfonts; of the remaining 15% I guess many either don't specify a font at all, or use previously-popular local font stacks (Arial, Helvetica, etc).

Trying to get a handle on the minority languages case seems difficult but perhaps the crawl data has some answers?

(I requested edit access to the doc, but don't have it yet).