User:Thomas K.R. Rettig

Intro

Hi! I’m Thomas. I contribute mainly to computer- and design-related Wikipedia pages. As a designer, I have a keen eye for anything related to typography.

Wikipedia skins

Screenshot of my Wikipedia skin on the English Wikipedia homepage.

In my free time, I enjoy creating Wikipedia skins (aka “themes”). This was the past skin that I used. However, I no longer maintain it because there are more efficient options around, such as Chrome extensions that inject custom styles. With a locally injected extension, the load time of the website is improved, resulting in a better browsing experience. And if you decide to modify any of my styles to suit your own needs, go ahead! The beauty of custom themes is that they can be tailored to fit individual preferences.

Typefaces used

• Source Serif 4 (for body text)
• iA Writer Quattro (for navigation and special UI elements)
• Inter Display (for headings).

Some points of interest:

1. These fonts are hosted freely by Cloudinary.
2. All of fonts listed above are variable fonts. So, instead of serving each weight of the font as a separate file, only one variable font file needs to be served.
3. iA Writer Quattro is a “multiplexed” font. Unlike non-multiplexed fonts, the horizontal width of the letters stay the same as the weight progresses from “thin” to “black”. Therefore, when hovering over links, there is no undesirable text reflow.
4. Inter Display is, as of December 2021, still in the beta stage of development. There are some known issues on the Github repository relating to Inter Display.