People's choice voting now open for Morisawa competition

Craig Eliason

Go check out the entries and vote for your favorites here. (I'd love to see people with a good critical eye for type design like TypeDrawers readers make up a significant share of voters.)

Jacob Casal

The link has an error Craig, from that thing that sometimes happens where it pastes incorrectly into the hyperlink most likely. I’ll save you the trouble.

Fixed Link

Craig Eliason

Thanks Jacob, I fixed mine too.
I'm used to other fora that automatically clean up pasted URLs.

Thomas Phinney

I would love to vote, but the arrangement makes it too difficult.

It is great that the order changes with every page load.

But... there is no numbering or anything, even a temporary numbering for the current page load. Also no way of marking ones favored options. So you have to just scroll up and down and hope one can remember exactly how much you liked the next best option—because you are never going to find it again out of the 378 (for Latin) unnumbered and unbookmarked options available.

Craig Eliason

The directions are confusing, but when it says
"One vote for one typeface is valid during the voting period"
I think it means you can't give any one typeface more than one vote, but it does NOT mean that you can only vote once overall. 
So in other words instead of trying to remember and re-find all your "finalists" to cast your one vote, you can just vote for all of them as you discover them. That's what I did.

Cory Maylett

I'm not quite sure what criterion one is supposed to use to judge. Whether I prefer this or that typeface usually depends on the context where its used. It also depends on things like, technical quality of the font, which can't really be ascertained here.

I suppose it's just a totally subjective contest based only aesthetics and personal tastes of what's shown. If that's the case, it's easy to pick out ones I don't like, but not nearly as easy to pick out the best.

Like others have said, I'm unsure whether voting on more than one of the hundreds there is doable. And if it is doable, there are hundred to choose from, which makes going back through them time and time again while keeping track of the ones already voted for as their order changes a whole lot more trouble than the effort involved.

Christian Thalmann

I suppose it's just a totally subjective contest based only aesthetics and personal tastes of what's shown.

It's a popularity contest, so it's supposed to be subjective.

It also depends on things like, technical quality of the font, which can't really be ascertained here.

At least some submissions are obviously bad even just judging from the tiny picture...

Like others have said, I'm unsure whether voting on more than one of the hundreds there is doable.

I think I just went through the entire list, as far as I can tell (at least it didn't offer me any more scrolling material). There's also a lot of duplicated (multiple weights of the same typeface).

George Thomas

After my first (and only) vote, this message:

"One vote for one typeface is valid during the voting period. More than one vote will not be counted as valid although multiple votes by one person might be possible on a screen."

So one typeface only, one vote per person. That really should have been specified up front because I might have waited until I got through the entire list. So it is...

Christian Thalmann

Nope:

I agree the pop-up message is a pretty misleading piece of Engrish, though.

Claudio Piccinini

I have to say that for a venue that set as its goal to raise the “quality bar” there is quite a number of amateurish and ugly “typefaces”… :-(

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

In fact the People's Choice results have generally made me think of... bad sushi.

Jacob Casal

There may be some poorly prepared fugu as choices, but I believe Craig noted his hope was for the critical TypeDrawers users to tip the odds away from those being served as the main dishes.

Thomas Phinney

Of course there are some amateur works. It is an open competition: anybody can enter. I think that is a fine thing. The question is, which works do the judges choose to honor?

Jacob Casal

True, they put themselves out there and offer themselves that much more opportunity to improve and refine their skills.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Thomas Phinney said:

Of course there are some amateur works. It is an open competition: anybody can enter. I think that is a fine thing.

Agreed, but the problem isn't what's submitted, it's what populism ends up putting on the pedestal.

Jacob Casal

How much do the main judges interact with the people’s choice award? Looking closer there appears to be the people’s choice and an optional, higher standard Akashi award.

Claudio Piccinini

Hrant H. Papazian said:

Agreed, but the problem isn't what's submitted, it's what populism ends up putting on the pedestal.

It’s all good: I just voted by mistake a  random typeface made out of “pixels”… LOL

Stephen Coles

There are some innovative and accomplished designs in there. It’s sad that the voting is by style rather than submission. Seeing multiple weights of the same design as separate entries is confusing.

Adam Jagosz

So is seeing most of the fonts with the same sample text and some random ones with others.