ergophobe - 5:06 pm on Jun 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

I guess this forum is hte best place for this. It's a typography issue that is not a serious obstacle to usability, but I think aesthetics are related to usability, so here goes.

I'm trying and trying to explain to someone why having a font cloud is bad design. I'm doing one site for him, but he has other sites that he maintains where he likes to let loose with fonts as in:

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This is a fairly common example (and yes, it is lifted from the site with keywords exemplified). It's just an aesthetic choice of course and these are his sites, but I would like to see him succeed (he's basically selling himself as a speaker) and I don't think that's putting himself in the best light.

When I'm done with his site design, he'll be handling updates and before I turn it over to him, I want to get him on track with a cleaner, nicer look to his typography. Back in 1996, it seems like there were all sorts of pages explaining why this is bad, but since they are so uncommon now, I can't find some good pages to point him to. I'm thinking of something along the lines of the original web pages that sucks pages from 1996 [webpagesthatsuck.com] but not so ridiculously over the top.

I'm looking for something that illustrates a bit more subtly the before and after of font cloud versus clean design, with an intelligent discussion. Or some good analogy.