Requiem for a candidate
IS BARACK OBAMA joining the establishment, now that he’s changed his logo from upper-and-lower to caps-and-small caps? I haven’t heard anyone make this charge, but there has been a lot of talk about the branding of the candidates.
Resolution, Exhibit A (of A-Z)
THE FOLLOWING IS a requested response to Bill Hill from its author to me.
Type as dogma
THIS PAST WEEKEND, the annual Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) conference in Brighton screened the movie Helvetica. This is a fine documentary, directed by Gary Hustwit. It’s been shown at a few other conferences this year, and is now enjoying a small art house run. As one of those who hasn’t used Helvetica since 1970, I was prepared not to like it. But Helvetica, the movie, won me over — mostly by intercutting many striking shots of the typeface in use all over the world, for every possible purpose, and in every situation, from monumental corporate identity to graffiti-covered municipal notices.
Fuzzy thinking and sharp type
FOR MANY YEARS now I've been aware that people designing for the web are interested in type being "sharper" on the screen. Customers have contacted our shop saying that logos, buttons, and whole fonts needed "sharpening". I think, they think, there is some magic hole that one can put a typographic image into, turn a handle, blow off the dust, and the fuzziness will be gone.
No timetable
for the readability wars
AFTER A FLURRY of discussion about the Microsoft proposal on EOT font embedding, I have some further thoughts on the subject of screen fonts.
Screen fonts,
from Adobe’s point of view
THE COMMENTS IN recent entries on this blog about text in Flash and PDF highlight that Adobe is doing a poor job of making our text features easily discoverable for designers, developers and end-users. I would like to address some of your misconceptions about Flash and PDF text, and encourage you to provide feedback on how we can continue to improve text within Adobe technologies. We’d love to talk to you.
Getting in bed with type
THERE IS FRESH word from Redmond that after all these years we may be able to get more typefaces onto web sites.
A new battle in the Net
WALKING THROUGH THE teaming casino of the Venetian in Vegas on the way to the Microsoft Mix 07 conference last week, you noticed a funny disparity between the way the men and women dressed for gambling. The women were ready for a cameo on a day-time soap opera. The men, with the exception of some older customers who have been to the Zegna shop at Caesar's, looked like frat rats. Shirt tales hanging out, three-day stubble, shorts.
Time for a redesign
LAST FRIDAY, 16 March, Time magazine appeared with a new design by Luke Hayman of Pentagram. (Luke talked about his on-staff redesign of New York on this site in December, and I reviewed the new Time.com a little later.)
Screen Fonts: An Abbr. Hist.
THE TEXT ON this site has caused a certain amount of heat, and I wanted to get my partner at the Font Bureau, David Berlow’s thoughts on the direction of screen fonts. We’ve been hearing about ClearType, and CoolType and other things, but the type on the web sites seems largely to have stayed the same thing, with the only thing improving is the displays. I should not have been surprised that David was not only thinking, but working on this problem, and with this entry, he brings us up to date.
Interview: Opening shots in
the Second Font War
A SURPRISE ANNOUNCEMENT from Berlow: An on-screen font solution that may save our eyes from being ruined by reading too many web sites.
It’s still the Journal
TUESDAY morning I opened the door, and in front of the apartment across the hall was a copy of the Wall Street Journal. My own was buried beneath The New York Times and the Financial Times, and I had to get the papers onto the kitchen table before I realized that the Journal had changed. It was smaller; less than a foot wide. Last week it would have stuck out of the stack.