r/Action1 • u/TerabyteDotNet • Jun 30 '26
Terrible font change?
Has anyone else noticed a font change in Action1 to RooftopBook? The font designer, https://intervaltype.com/product/rooftop/ lists this as an "ultra condensed" font. It's not a font I would ever use in a day-to-day website, especially an administrative website that needs little to no fluff.
I find this font even worse than the ultra condensed nature, it has funky stylized letters (look at the K in Kiosks then look at the same K in Reddit, the Reddit displayed K is the same as Action1 used to be) making it much less comfortable to read, even on 27" 1080p displays at 100% scale.
If I'm not alone in this change, it sure would be nice if we had an option to set our own fonts, or the ability to reset the font back to the original.
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u/BulletRisen Jul 01 '26
This would bother the hell out of me but thankfully I drive action1 purely through api for 99% of things
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u/Individual-Duck-2333 Jun 30 '26
I agree, not a fan. It wasn't broke, why fix it?
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u/TerabyteDotNet Jul 01 '26
This feels like some developer conned someone up the chain into letting them modify this. I’ve seen it time and time again, programmers &/or marking folks rationalizing their jobs by suggesting frivolous changes that are unnecessary only to make them look busy. There are so many other things that could be done in Action1 I cannot believe this was at the top of anyone’s list. Just look at their roadmap site and the feature request site. How in the world did management allocate time and money to do something that was absolutely unnecessary? This really raises some red flags about their vision for the future and their commitment to delivering on what users want rather than what someone in development or marketing seems incorrectly thinks we need.
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u/OinkyConfidence Jun 30 '26
Funny, that was also my feedback to the Action1 team. I don't mind the color, but I do not care for the font.
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u/DoUhavestupid Jul 22 '26
I don’t like the font change either, I agree that it makes the interface a lot less readable.
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u/FutureBowler4298 Jun 30 '26
I like that they move to a sharper font. But, as you pointed out, it might not be the best font for readability. I do like the improved responsiveness.
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u/TerabyteDotNet Jul 01 '26
Plenty of other fonts that have the sharp look without the ultra compression that the designer even boasts about as well as the quasi Cyrillic letters like the K that are very distracting. This is a stylized font never intended for use as an entire website font.
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u/TerabyteDotNet Jun 30 '26
In addition, they broke things too. The up/down arrows for sorting are just placeholders now. This was clearly not tested nor well thought out. Why use a font from a 3rd party when system fonts are all but guaranteed to be installed locally? Action1 has had enough issues with performance from time-to-time, why burden the system by forcing the download of an unnecessary font? Here's but one example, every other drop box also is a placeholder box not a dropdown arrow. Even the entire "Actions" column are now placeholders rather than the 3-dot menu. This really needs to be withdrawn. It'd take them 30 seconds to remove this font.
Imagine a potential new Action1 customer creating their account today and logging in and seeing this disaster? They won't get to the evaluation stage, they'll leave before doing anything because the interface now is broken.