System Font Stack

Beautiful fonts come at a cost. There’s the weight of serving those fonts which comes at a price tag that slow down the overall performance of the site. There’s also FOUT which is one of those annoying things (although Typekit has fixed this in its own way) that only a web designer might notice but sucks anyway.

Maybe there’s something to not styling text at all and using what the operating system already has downloaded locally and has available for use:

Defaulting to the system font of a particular operating system can boost performance because the browser doesn’t have to download any font files, it’s using one it already had. That’s true of any “web safe” font, though. The beauty of “system” fonts is that it matches what the current OS uses, so it can be a comfortable look.