Poet Ponders the Digital

Specimen of the typeface Comic Sans. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Personally, I support everyone being able to type and read in whatever typefaces individuals prefer. If you like Comic Sans , then change the font while you type or read online content. If you like Helvetica , use that. The digital world is not print. You can change typefaces . You can change their sizes. You can change colors. There is no reason to argue over what you use to type or to read as long as I can use typefaces that I like. Now, as a design researcher? I'll tell you that type matters a lot to both the biological act of reading and the psychological act of constructing meaning. Statistically, there are "better" and "worse" type for conveying messages. There are also typefaces that are more legible and more readable. Sometimes, legibility does not help readability, either, as a type with overly distinct letters (legibility) can hinder word shapes and decoding (readability). ...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley September 2, 2014 Deadline October 2014 Issue Font Wrangling: Take Control of Your Typefaces Too many typefaces are cluttering up printed pages, online spaces and computer drives. Hundreds, or even thousands, of fonts on our computing devices prove too tempting for some people. It’s time to wrangle your fonts and refine your designs. A high school teacher rejected the first term paper I typed into a computer. Notice that I didn’t write the paper on the computer; I entered text I had written on paper. I sought to avoid the hassles of using correction fluid with my typewriter by switching to the computer and its dot-matrix printer. Despite using the “letter quality” mode of my Epson printer, the built-in font looked odd. The teacher complained that the lowercase g, p and q were squished and lines of ink smudges were unacceptable. Unless you could afford a daisy-wheel printer with its typewriter mechanism, a personal computer was an ...

In college, I wrote software documentation for mainframe users, which meant I had the opportunity to use text editors and word processors on a variety of computer platforms. I composed documentation on everything from glorified typewriters (DEC VT102 and IBM 3270 terminals) to slick WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") Apple Macs. I was probably not alone in being captivated by the Mac experience. Toss in PageMaker, a few fonts, and a LaserWriter for a complete desktop publishing system, and the Mac was hard to beat. Yet, I quickly realized that I wrote better on my MS-DOS 2.1 PC running WordPerfect 4.2 from floppy disks. How could this be? The Mac was easier to use and the papers I typed looked much better on paper. Why did I type so much more, and much better, on the PC? I didn't work on the Mac; I explored. I'd play with fonts, formatting options, and the nifty features of Word or PageMaker. I'd also play Crystal Quest, Lode Runner, and Dark Castle for ...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley July 2009 Issue May 30, 2009 Font Fanatic: Putting the Best Face Forward How words look on a page or screen can be as important as what they state. Consider corporate logos and signs you see around town. The lettering conveys everything from how “serious” the message is to associations with specific eras. Personally, I love the clean precision of Art Deco lettering, which brings to mind elegance, the Roaring 20s, and a young Hollywood. However, no matter how much I might like Art Deco, I would not prepare a business letter using the typefaces Broadway, Plaza, or Desdemona. These might look great on Agatha Christie or F. Scott Fitzgerald novel covers, but they are inappropriate for a letter to my university department chair. Having a few hundred fonts installed on your computer does not mean you should try to use them all, especially within the same document. I’ve seen the results of font addiction and they aren’t attractive. I admit to being...

This is a portion of my summer (re)reading list, at least on one particular subject matter. I am reading various books on type and design. So far, I have completed Dodd and Lupton. The Bringhurst and Parker texts are re-reads, which I will tackle later in the summer. The current book on my stand is the Stanley Morison Tally of Types . I'm putting the bibliography up top, to stress the books a bit more than my own ramblings. Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style . 3rd ed ed. Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks, Publishers, 2004. Consuegra, David. American Type: Design & Designers . New York: Allworth Press, 2004. Dodd, Robin. From Gutenberg to Open Type: An Illustrated History of Type From the Earliest Letterforms to the Latest Digital Fonts . Vancouver, WA: Hartley & Marks Publishers, 2006. Lupton, Ellen. Thinking With Type : A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students . Vol. Design briefs. 1st ed ed. New York: Prince...

What makes a Web site readable? As the Internet moved from the ASCII texts of the USENET and FTP repositories towards HTML, no one really cared about appearance. The notion was that content was everything — and most content files were journal articles and scientific research. The early notion of specifying fonts on the World Wide Web was a major shift from the original notion of the Web. You can look at changes from HTML pre-1.0 to our current standards and the shift towards visual content is obvious. The reality is that there was no stopping the drift towards a visual medium. Given basic HTML 2.0, designers resorted to complex tables-within-tables to mimim familiar print designs. From the earliest handwritten manuscripts, artists have known how words are placed on a page (or screen) affects how they are read. No one was about to settle for no control over a Web site's appearance. Temptation to experiment can lead to innovation, but on the Web it also helps to k...