Fast Sites Start with Fonts: A Deep Dive with Daniel Roe

In this episode of The Weekly Dev’s Brew, Jan sits down with Daniel Roe to dive deep into a topic devs often overlook: web fonts. From performance pitfalls to implementation strategies, Daniel breaks down why your font choices might be slowing down your site—and what you can do about it. Whether you’ve been blindly copy-pasting Google Fonts or wondering how to ship faster, cleaner web experiences, this episode delivers practical insights with zero fluff.

☕ Pull up a brew and learn how to stop letting fonts wreck your performance budget.


Our Fantastic Guest
Danie Roe
Daniel leads the Nuxt core team. Previously, he was CTO of a SaaS startup and founder of a creative agency focusing on clarity of vision and message.
His open-source work has a focus in the Vue.js and Nuxt ecosystems. He's a keynote speaker at conferences and involved in consultancy with companies around the world, particularly around JAMstack, serverless and software architecture.

Bluesky
GitHub
LinkedIn

Chapters

00:00 - Into
00:36 - performance impact of fonts
03:03 - Font Optimization
04:37 - What is font subsetting?
06:54 - How to handle font licenses?
11:05 - How to prevent layout shifts?
17:07 - How to learn about fonts?
20:01 - What are Variable Fonts?
22:55 - Accessibility of Fonts
26:38 - System vs Custom Fonts
30:46 - About Font Providers
33:15 - How to know which font is applied?
35:48 - Local vs remote fonts
36:41 - Dynamical changing fonts?
38:17 - Fonts and i18n
40:45 - On Ligatures
42:36 - Outro

Links and Resources
Stoyan's Blog

Production support for this video was kindly provided by WebStorm. Thanks for helping bring this idea to life!

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