Optics, Font-Tech, and Responsiveness

kupfers

This talk by Erik van Blokland left a lasting impression and still gets me thinking two days after I watched it.

Beyond Tellerrand was a web design/dev conference held in May in Düsseldorf. While probably only a tiny fraction of the attendees were able to comprehend anything of what EvB talked about, I regard it a must-see for everyone involved in type these days.

kupfers

For everyone who does not see the link above because it gets converted into an inline video, it’s here: vimeo.com/70414929

Craig Eliason

Thanks for the link Indra. Were there particular parts that keep you thinking days later?

kupfers

Mh lets see.

As some might know I have been in the DIN commitee that recently reworked the German norm on readability for almost three years. So the part about vision interested me a lot. Erik explained me his findings a while ago already but this was concise and pretty easy to understand and something I wish all fans and followers of the recently manifolding legi-/readability researches would see. In general I regard good spacing and proportions of a typefaces perhaps even more important than nice and unique shapes, and his research on what is left over after letters hit our brain spoke to that. I would like to find a way how one can incorporate these things into current advise on readability. Most of the arguements we all make are all the same phrases copied and repeated for years, with hardly any real scientific proof behind them. (Also I’d like to promote arc minutes to be used as a more helpful and common measuring unit.) For now I built a short overview of Erik’s research into my talks on choosing typefaces or other related topics.

The part about the unique outlines of the Caslon n amazed me and let me ponder why I chose the points I chose and put them where I put them. (And how many cases we know of where someone finds identical parts of outlines in another font.) This too was something Erik had shown me before, so I was able to take an enlarged look at the overlay of digitizations, and it is just amazing how different they are close up.

The part of what can be responsive on screen nowadays spoke to me because I have had some fiery discussions about responsive typography with Oliver Reichenstein for a while. (You can read about this on my website). He was advocating different grades of fonts for different screen resolution and I was making the arguement that good typography depends on so many interrelated parameters that an exactly similar stroke weight across devices is not the most important thing. There are more things type or typography could respond to, and I have some ideas about this and how to demonstrate this, so it was great to see all these experiments Erik (and Just) did, and the refresher on Multiple Master fonts and interpolation that got me started to think about responding type and setscrews again. How can typographic parameters adjust to changing circumstances (what happens, or should happen, to the others when you change one), and how can the font itself respond, beyond serving different “prefabricated files” to different devices or layouts, perhaps reviving the MM idea for different use cases … sorry, I’m starting to babble.

Anyway, I am interested in screen fonts, rendering, hinting and other type tech in general, so that whole tech part was great and let me think about the “future of hinting” again. And of course the nostalgic stories about what they did in the ’90s and Knuth was fun. Also let me recall what I did back then, and where, and how FF Kosmik was one of the first fonts I bought for my LC 475. And Beowolf was fun but it just never printed (also the random Kosmik crashed the LaserWriter 360 often enough.)

I want more of these kind of talks.

Maurice Meilleur

'A font is a dictionary of shapes.' Not the thrust of his argument, but I am totally stealing that for the first day of class this term.