(Following up from this thread in Design.)

Having read that it's a useful learning exercise for a starting designer to try digitizing a historical (metal) type, I decided to try this with Bruce Rogers's Centaur. I've never seen a digital version that looks remotely close to the beautiful text of books typeset in metal Centaur – they're all come out too fine and spindly, and look oddly sterile somehow. I'm clearly not the only one to think so.

Hey there,
New user here. I have a long-running web site which I built myself as a hobby, but which gets tens of thousands of visitors each month. I want to do a thorough redesign on the cheap (i.e., I'll be doing it), with elegance, simplicity, and usability as the key goals. It's an arts and humanities site with some scholarly leanings, so I'm going for a classic look without being stuffy. If there is some personality and history to the design rather than just being "boilerplate classicism," all the better.