Comments on: Subscripts: Type News and Links 1

By: johno (iLT)

johno (iLT) — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 03:15:30 +0000

Ko
Certainly will. Hoope to have an interview with a Letterpress person pretty soon.

By: Ko

Ko — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:31:04 +0000

Keep up the interest in letterpress. The beauty of letterforms which type designers / punch cutters of earlier years could achieve in such small things as cast letters is still an inspiration.
Even though I’m interested in all things typographic, and I only use it in daily life in digital form, I just love visiting those places where they still cast type and print by hand. The Stichting Lettergieten (Westzaan, Netherlands) has a large collection of matrices and still supplies lead type from their Monotype setters and other casting machines to whoever is into letterpress.

By: johno (iLT)

johno (iLT) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 06:33:13 +0000

Another interesting discussion about embeddable fonts is, The resurrection of downloadable Web fonts over at 456 Berea St.

By: Sallyyi

Sallyyi — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 04:42:00 +0000

I don’t understand everything about the enbedded fonts, but I like the Smashing post. Thanks johno!

By: LaurenMarie - Creative Curio

LaurenMarie - Creative Curio — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:42:05 +0000

Unfortunately I have no photos of my old professor, John. But there is one on his website (I don't think it's a very good one of him though). Ah, here's another one (from one of my other prof's sites) and you can't really see their faces, but this is the two of them together (and so's this). I sure miss them! They were both excellent instructors in typography and design.

By: Hamish M

Hamish M — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:15:40 +0000

Some cool links there John, thanks. (Those type radio interviews are weird at times, but very interesting)

Also, I have to agree with everyone, it’s quite a surprise how dependent on images some of those sites are, it’s really very inaccessible, a lot of them don’t even have alt text!

By: Jelmer

Jelmer — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:50:20 +0000

Inspiring, especially the smashing magazine article on BIG fonts was good, thanks for sharing!

I agree with Chris though, some sites in the list are a bit backwards though, one was based on one background image! Which means the site will be inaccessible to quite a lot of people.. It looks like a photoshop mockup put online! no accessibility whatsoever, in terms of type most of them looked great though.

I did know about font smoothing, seeing it on other computers, but didn’t know before how it was setup, what a shame :P, so yeah that’s an issue as well, it does make a huge difference, as a web designer it’s not that bad to have it turned off though, so you know what your fonts look like when you make them larger for a lot of people.

By: Michael Montgomery

Michael Montgomery — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:10:37 +0000

No problem at all.

“I do think that once embedding becomes the norm (and it surely will)”
Hope springs eternal.

By: johno (iLT)

johno (iLT) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 18:48:57 +0000

Michael
Many thanks for your response. Your comment was marked as spam. Very odd, especially as your preceding comments passed the spam filter without any problem. Apologies for that. The A List Apart article is a great one.
As you allude to, one of the main barriers to widespread adoption is the Font companies (and foundries); the music industry parallel is an interesting one, and the font sellers are very aware of the developments with font embedding; I do think, however, that they don’t know what to do and how to do it. The only difference between the music industry and the font “industry” is that the font industry comprises many small companies and many more individual font designers, who make a great deal less than the singers and songwriters.

I think it’s a really difficult one for the font sellers and type designers, but rather than opening up a forum and discussing the topic, they do appear to be — at least it looks like it — burying their heads in the sand.

The discussion on this over at Typographica is an interesting one, though I don’t share Stephens “fear” of web-embedded fonts. I do think that once embedding becomes the norm (and it surely will), initially we’re going to see lots of “MySpace” typography. In the long term, however, surely more choices will leader to better web typography….

The other barrier that you mention is of course the browser vendors; but then that’s a little Catch 22: should the vendors offer browsers that support embeddable fonts before the font industry decides what it’s going to do; or should they get on with it and hope the font companies follow. Perhaps no-one wants to make the first move.

In all of this I don’t blame the Font “industry” (of course it’s not really organised enough to be accurately referred to as an actual industry); the situation is a complex one; and do the font sellers have the leverage, or even the money and resources to set the whole thing in motion. Imagine it: we could have type foundries going on strike!

By: Michael Montgomery

Michael Montgomery — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:53:33 +0000

For more information about embedded fonts, here’s an article by one of the inventors of CSS:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssatten

(Not sure why my comment got lost…)