Typeface on Retina displays

Mostafa Hajizadeh

A trending discussion this week was about how typefaces look on Retina display in the new iPad.

I've not seen it yet and wonder what makes it so different from 3.5 inch Retina screens that we have all seen.

Have you seen typefaces on the new iPad screen? What's your opinion about this? Do typefaces need extra preparation for Retina displays? What's different on this screens? This is specially important because sooner or later Retina screens will be in use in computers too.

Here are some opinions I've seen on Twitter in last few days:

If you want good type on Retina displays, stop discussing hinting et al. Just search for faces that happen to look good. Like the old days. link

Sharpness of type is being celebrated. But that’s not a quality in itself. Just looks cold. Type needs a certain amount of fuzziness. Warmth link

Forget hinting. Low resolution needs it. iPad1+2 just needs bigger sizes. iPad3 wants old school fonts, a bit bolder: http://bit.ly/FQteUa link

I have another suspicion about typography on the iPad3. It needs organic noise, otherwise it all looks like dead plastic. #NewAesthetic link

Suspicion3: Hinting corrects a distortion—since there is no distortion on Retina, the hinting becomes a distortion? s.NeueHelvetica+iPhone4. link

New iPad is almost 'too' sharp. Fonts were never meant to be so crisp. They're not on paper. Wondering if devs should add slight distress. link

New devices and new screens are comparable to different qualities of paper: sometimes the type needs tiny adjustments to get best result. link

It's the synthetic sharpness and the backlight that makes both system fonts look plump and print fonts over designed. #Retina #Typography link

If type looks skinny on iPad3, it's not display's, type's or rasterizer's fault. The typographer simply made the wrong choice, ... link

"We need to optimize our fonts for the new retina displays" – dumbest comment of the week. link

Mark Simonson

The iPhone 4/4S/iPod touch screen is a bit sharper than the new iPad screen. On the iPhone retina screen, it is quite difficult to see the pixels without a magnifying glass (at least for me--I'm 56). With the new iPad, the pixels are just slightly visible if you look carefully, you can see a little of the antialiasing. This is when looking at it with my reading glasses. Without them, I have to view from almost 20" to focus, and at that distance I can't make out pixels on either the old iPad display or the new one, but the text looks thinner and higher contrast on the new display.

In general, the new display looks like a transparency on a light table. (It reminds me of the way type looks on RC output from a typesetter, which usually looks sharper and higher contrast than printed pages.) Most other displays, like my laptop and desktop Macs, look soft in comparison.

The fact that it's a backlit image is the biggest difference between this and paper as far as the type goes. 

I agree that there is no reason to "optimize" fonts for these new displays, just be careful when choosing fonts like you do for print. If anything, it would be a good idea to see how a font looks on these displays when designing on it, just as you would make print samples to help with design decisions.

James Puckett

It needs organic noise

Fonts were never meant to be so crisp

This canard was born when John Baskerville improved ink, presses, and paper enough that type could be sharp for the first time. It came back again when the ATF matrix engraver came into use, again when photo-typography appeared, and again when digital fonts were being used with high resolution offset printing. It my opinion this usually comes from people who feel compelled to comment but cannot come up with worthwhile complaints about new technology. So they just attack the very improvement it provides as being fundamentally inhuman. We can expect a short burst of autotraced revivals with OpenType cycling designed to bring back randomness and warmth before everyone gets used to high resolution displays and moves on.

Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh

Looks like you can stop following 70% of those people.

James Hultquist-Todd

Personally, as one who despises hinting, I welcome the retina displays.

Mark Simonson

After I first saw the iPhone 4 retina screen in 2010, several things have occurred to me:

- Low resolution screens and type have never been a good combination, no matter how you try to make it work. Trying to force them together can only lead to heartbreak and unsatisfactory compromise.

- The need for carefully hinted and tuned fonts is only going to shrink. The only question in my mind is how fast.

- The interest I had in getting more deeply into TT hinting pretty much evaporated. It seems a little like taking up blacksmithing when the Model T was starting to come off the assembly lines.

The new iPad screen makes me think these things even more, especially because it came sooner than I expected and at a more reasonable price than I expected.

James Puckett

The interest I had in getting more deeply into TT hinting pretty much evaporated. It seems a little like taking up blacksmithing when the Model T was starting to come off the assembly lines.

I share your sentiments. When I look back on my early twenties I see years wasted on now-dead computing and internet technologies. I’m not going to make that mistake again with type. It makes more sense to focus on emerging markets with long-term potential like Arabic and Devanagari. 

And as an individual I can’t compete with the bigger foundries anyway. H&FJ and Font Bureau can produce type with outlines customized for screen use and top-notch hinting. Linotype can flood the market with hinted versions of its huge collection of big x-height sans faces and newspaper serifs.  Trying to compete with those giants with my resources is just silly.

The new iPad screen makes me think these things even more, especially because it came sooner than I expected and at a more reasonable price than I expected.

I think we are going to see something even bigger than the DRAM and LCD price crashes of the 2000s. Screen resolution, combined with price, will be the only thing that differentiates mass market computers in the next decade. Desktop hardware capabilities have become large irrelevant irrelevant to everyone but PC gamers—and that market is dying fast. The same will happen in the tablet market. Standalone desktop monitors also need upgrades—they can’t get much bigger, cheaper, or come with many more ports. And unlike last time Korean and American antitrust regulators will be watching like hawks to ensure nobody colludes to break the pricing free fall once it starts. 

James Hultquist-Todd

James,

I agree with you except for the comment about desktop hardware capabilities. There is a fairly significant percentage who care about these things, specifically, those that deal in 3d modelling, animation, and video production. I see desktops further defining themselves as a niche market, used only by those who do that kind of work while everyone else moves towards tablets.

Also, the monitor, to a point, is only as good as the hardware that supports it. I suspect it will be some time before video cards capable of retina-quality display make their way into the average consumer laptop or desktop.

James Puckett

I suspect it will be some time before video cards capable of retina-quality display make their way into the average consumer laptop or desktop.

I have faith in the engineers at Nvidia to start pushing for higher resolutions faster than most people think possible. They’ve got a good history of exceeding expectations..

Matthew Butterick

Data-transfer rates are also a limiting factor. If you double the resolution, you quad the pixels, so you also have to quad the capacity of the monitor cables. (For comparison, USB 2 goes at 480 Mbits/sec; DVI goes at 4000+ Mbits/sec.) Not an issue in the iPhone or iPad because all the hardware is integrated. That's also reason to suppose we'll see Retina-quality screens in laptops before we see them on the desktop.

Erik van Blokand

Readers of CJK fonts will welcome the increase of resolution.

Stephen Coles

Many of these comments are ignorant of the fact that all hinting instructions are ignored by all OS X and iOS systems, regardless of pixel density. Hinting is not a factor on any iPhone or iPad.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Stephen Coles

Yes, as confirmed to me by an Apple employee.

Nick Sherman

all hinting instructions are ignored by all OS X

To be totally accurate, this isn't totally true. In text where smoothing is turned off (there's a setting in system preferences where the user can set the smoothing threshold size), hinting information is indeed used to render the fonts.

Here is an image showing Georgia on a Mac side by side with a version of Georgia where the hinting data has been stripped. The smoothing threshold had to be set above 12px in order to see the effects:

Granted, this smoothing threshold is set to 4px by default, and is presumably left there by most users. As such, hinting information would only be used below 4px in most cases on OS X.

Nick Shinn

One can still design/target a font at a particular technology/device, even if hinting is not an issue.

Reflective and backlit ebooks are quite different beasts.

Nick Sherman

I should also mention that the system-level smoothing threshold in OS X can be overridden in Safari and Chrome by changing the CSS -webkit-font-smoothing setting to none (details on that here). When smoothing is turned off in this manner, the hinting information kicks in similarly to the situation I mentioned before.

Stephen Coles

Thanks for the exception, Nick. Still, on iOS, the user can't turn off smoothing, so a lot of that Twitter discussion about hinting was uninformed.

Nick Sherman

Yes, I totally agree.

Mostafa Hajizadeh

I'm glad I asked you guys about this. Learned a lot indeed.

I was worried that as a new type designer I have to spend a huge time on tuning fonts.

Thanks everybody for the insight and information.

Thomas Phinney

Well, although there isn't much the type designer can do with hinting to affect Mac or iOS screen display, hinting still matters for this obscure OS called “Windows”....

Also for the Kindle.

Rodrigo Saiani

One thing I wonder about high resolution displays is: can it actually substitute printed proofs at all?

Patch Hofweber

Funny question, Rosa. The print world is alive and well, but more and more focus is on the web, so in a lot of ways it already has and is substituting printed specimens. As for proofs, nothing beats the real thing, nor does it seem to desirable to replace specifically the proofs. If you’re wondering if high-res is making screens a more viable alternative to print, of course, and things will only get better. 326ppi isn’t really the limit, things are going to get more realistic, and will eventually outperform traditional ink in some respects.
Why Retina Isn’t Enough — John Brownlee, for Cult of Mac

But now that we’ve seen retina do we just give up making screen-optimized typefaces? We’ve got a ways to go until the majority is on retina screens, and even there, typefaces like Elena still perform better than say, Baskerville. Am I full of crap?

Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh

Am I full of crap?

I'd believe your argument if Baskerville worked better than Elena in print. It doesn't.

Nick Shinn

One thing I wonder about high resolution displays is: can it actually substitute printed proofs at all?

Depends what you want the proof for, that is to say, who is signing off on what.

A screen display that emits light will not do a good job of showing what a piece of reflective printing will look like, before one inks up the plates.

However… http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/05/japan-display-shows-low-power-reflective-lcd/

Patch Hofweber

Am I full of crap?

I'd believe your argument if Baskerville worked better than Elena in print. It doesn't.

Haha touché. How about Hoefler or Clifford, then? Are lower contrast contemporary serifs a temporary solution to screens? Despite increasing retinization, these are still preferable if you ask me.

Diego Maldonado

if you intend to use an iPad (or any retina display) like a proof for what will be a printed work (or type) no, it won't work. On the iPad you don't have paper texture, and all this "physical stuff" that changes how the type looks. The retina display can show really small details, that can be good or bad. Like if you have inktraps that should disapear on paper, on the retina display, they will be perfectly there. But I made some tests (cause I work directly with that, on iPad magazines) and typefaces like Optima (the worst type for screen ever) looks totally beautiful on retina display, so, if you are concerned about small curves and small details that was a complete screen/hint issue, be cool, retina will show it beautifully.

Nick Shinn

Optima worst, but Eras close behind.

Max Phillips

I'd believe your argument if Baskerville worked better than Elena in print. It doesn't.

Depends on how you define 'works', doesn't it? And maybe on who's doing the defining.

Meanwhile, check out tnr.com for extensive use of Baskerville text. Might be just me, but I find it surprisingly pleasant to read.

kupfers

I don’t see any Baskerville on their site, only Georgia. They specified it in the CSS but don’t serve it or pull it from a service. You might see it because you have a Baskerville installed?

Max Phillips

Yeah, I do, but not a web Baskerville. Weird.