Word of the day

I swear I am not bored today. Just randomly running across stuff too cool to keep to myself. This may be getting weak, but I liked it, especially as I actually am semi-knowledgeable about typography. And sort of a nerd for all sorts of stuff like this. I have a whole book on units of measure, and still didn't recognize this.

Twip

This definition from wikipedia seems good. Short version: It's a 20th of a point. So, very small. I ran across it deep in my S60, which is noted even in the wikipedia definition. I wonder why they use it? My only thought is they didn't want to have fractional sizes, so someone years ago broke open /his/ dictionary of measures and picked some arbitrarily small unit. But I like it.

I didn't know half these people were still alive

I watched the Helvetica movie. Nicely constructed film, actually. I like how its (almost) entirely narrated by the interviewees. Instead of being about a specific font per. se., I read a lot of this as a discussion of contemporary design. Nice hook to get lots of designers to talk about the role of type in design and meaning, how design and typography communicates meaning, and the future of visual communcation as it continues be more egalitarian and accessible. Highly suggested.

Helvetica on DVD

Remember the Helvetica movie? Well, its now available on Netflix! Its at the top of my Queue right now.

Personally, I am still into Akzidenz Grotesk, and playing and am starting to play with the Olive/Nord family. Gillsans isn't bad for heads, but its SO heavily used by all the Apple presentation software themes.

I do not think "font" means what you think it means

I am regularly asked to change the font size, or asked what the best font color would be. This bugs the crap out of me, but normally I keep my mouth shut as its just too much effort. I have too traditional a design background. I've specified stuff for guys on linotype machines. Hell, I've set lead type and run a letterpress myself. So, here's the truth (the short version): A font is a collection of typefaces. Originally, sorta like the "font of wisdom," as an actual thing. Here's a physical font: Or, a type cabinet. Okay, actually the etymology is the same as foundry, cause you cast all the type. But it works for me to remember it. Anyway, this case does not contain a single font, but ideally its in a production environment, and a cabinet or three is occupied entirely with being one font. Within that, you have a number of typefaces. Here's a selection of them from one of my favorites, Futura: Note that they vary in weight and tilt. A common weight is "bold." Ever heard it called "boldface?" That's because its a bold typeface. Even heavier weights are black, and half-divisions are usually "extra," like extra-bold, etc. Adrian Frutiger came up with a numbering scheme for his Univers face, but they are still usually labeled with the traditional names. Note the neat lighter and narrower faces that you probably didn't know existed. Italics don't really exist. Not sure where the word came from, and too lazy to look it up now. Oblique is what that's called in the type world where I come from. Now, another important thing is that all these faces exist. Selecting the bold face from the list is the right way to get pretty, accurate bold type. So, what happens when you just hilite a word, and press ctrl-B? Well, nothing good. The program applies a style to the face. It takes a guess as to what bold, or oblique, might look like in that sort of face, and just applies it, thickening lines or tilting forms. Its not bad these days, but its not right either. The type designer spent literally years perfecting his oblique face, and you just pressed ctrl-I and ignored all his work.

Why don't we use italics online, anyway?

At the risk of publishing something that relates directly to my work, Sprint has recently changed their branding. The type standards, currently print-based, say everything is in italics (well, oblique, but that's another post entirely).

My kneejerk reaction (to no avail in the first iteration) is "no italics online!" But then I had to prove it. And this was way harder than I thought it would be. It was sort of interesting trying to investigate such a deep-seated heuristic.

As it turns out, I never found the text of any study that proves it. There's reference to one, and that's good enough for me. Instead, I am relying on the "everyone says it" method, as well as proving it thru demonstrations of the grid effect. Oh, and one disclaimer. I didn't find all these links myself. The whole list is a straight up ripoff of those emailed to me by Fred Pilgrim, off to the south about 3 yards.

Overall, its just about web-resolution. Type traditionally is smoothly drawn or pressed; pen strokes or lead type create lines going any direction. Any irregularity from beat-up type, or paper texture was inconsequential at normal sizes (usually) and regardless had no direction, so italics with their angles suffered no discernability issues. In reproducable print, from the dawn of photo-lithography to today, the screen (whether angled, straight or stochiastic, square, round or oval) is of such high resolution that all shapes appear essentially straight. Except for very straight lines very close to (but not quite /at/) the screen angle, everything looks smooth and sharp.

Digital displays are generally around 80 ppi. Some are higher, some even nudging over 100, but generally not. If resolutions exceeding 200 ppi become commonplace, this will begin to become moot, but this is possibly decades away due to low-cost and high-longevity of current display devices if nothing else. Anyway, unlike print, the low resolution of type on the digital display means that angled items, like the vertical in italic type are rendered as a series of steps. Cleartype, Smoothtype and other technologies try to mitigate this with anti-aliasing, but its imperfect; the sharpness cannot be preserved with such technologies. Its just a limit of physics.

There are additional issues with readability (comprehension, fatigue) of italics or oblique faces in print, but they are not quite as severe as the online component so I am ignoring it for now.

Anyway, here's what a bunch of others say about this. Interesting quotes about italics are here directly, but follow the link for context and more useful info. The IE box model bug is a great one I had forgotten about. Seen a similar one with Verdana (I think) having a space/letterform issue with their Ws.

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/usability/textfontcss.html

Research has shown that people can read faster if words are written using mixed case rather than all upper case. Blocks of bold and italics text are more difficult to read. Black is easier to read than colored fonts.

http://www.jimbyrne.co.uk/show.php?contentid=53 Jim Byrne is the founder of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers and has been a Web accessibility specialist since 1996.

Avoid using italics for small text sizes: the problems of screen display of outline fonts has not entirely disappeared. Italized fonts look particularly bad at small sizes - as italics do not easy to render using a square pixel grid. If you must use italics, avoid using them for large blocks of text.

http://www.bindu-design.co.nz/pcnz.html

Italics don't work on current low resolution screens: Staying with the same page we see that the chief executive's message, is written in italics. Research has established that reading from computer screens is about 25 percent slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know about this human-factor research, usually say they do not enjoy reading from a computer screen. Text in italics should be avoided on web sites, as italics are even harder to read on current low resolution (below 80 dpi) screens. I predict that the screen readability problems of today will be solved by the year 2008. By that time we will see screens of 300 dpi in common use.

http://www.smartisans.com/articles/web_writing.aspx

While the Stanford-Poynter study focused on reading news on the Web, the results were similar to various studies conducted by Jakob Nielson, Jarod Spool, and others in the mid-1990's... ...But don't use italics for emphasis because italics are difficult to read on a computer monitor. There are just not enough pixels to render italics clearly.

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200501/ie_and_italics/ Interesting info about Internet Explorer & Italics

Ever seen IE/Win ruin a layout just because a few words are in italics? I have. Just the other day I was pulling my hair out over this bug...

Typography: Getting attention for a moment

Type is a pet peeve of mine. I love the inherent beauty of good letterforms, and try to use good type, but its so very badly abused these days. Not just Word being used as a page layout program, or the loss of knowledge, or the lack of accurate semantics anymore. No one knows what a font is anymore; it now seems to mean "type," or at best "face." Someday that'll piss me off more, and I'll rant about it with much more specificity.

But someone noticed that Helvetica was designed 50 years ago, and there are a few people talking about it. The best thing seems to be this neat documentary film by Gary Hustwit.

Doesn't seem to be available on DVD yet, so the best way to see this is to visit the infosthetics site and see a few clips from it.


Business week picked up on this, and wrote about it recently from the POV of business, specifically that its a great logo face.

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the sleek, streamlined font is used by countless corporations, from 3M and Microsoft to American Airlines and Staples. Its simple lines and proportional letters make it easy to read, whether on a tiny package of Post-it notes or on the side of an airplane. For decades, the typeface has proven an effective element of many a corporate branding and marketing strategy.