Readable Web » Education

Practical Font Design, Third Edition

Richard Fink — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:29:12 +0000

In Digital Publishing you need to co-ordinate your efforts with many people. Web designers, developers, server techs – the list goes on and on – and the more you know about how those people go about their work, the better off you will be.

With fonts, the “collaboration” might take the form of a purchase, or a free download, or just a link to the font in your HTML. But there is a font-maker somewhere on the other end of that transaction. And the more you know about how that font came to be, the better off you’ll be. And unlike a lot of things in today’s fast-paced environment – where it’s hard to separate the side-shows from the main attractions – a knowledge of fonts and how they’re made won’t be obsolete in just a few years. Changes in font technology come at a snail’s pace, and what changes do come, are incremental. So what you learn about fonts will pay dividends for as long as you live. Really.

Have A “Practical” Christmas

David Bergsland’s Practical Font Design is now in its Third Edition. It’s greatly improved in many, many ways from the Second Edition. (Bergsland not only listens to reader feedback, but he acts on it, too.) It’s still the only book of its kind, and it does a simple thing: it tells you, in a friendly and to-the-point manner, how one experienced font designer and teacher – David Bergsland – goes about his work. It’s a must-buy for font designers. It’s a should-buy for any web designer, graphic designer, or anybody involved with digital publishing.
Not much interested in the technical details? – It’s worth the price just for the “history of type” section and as a flip-through reference. If you’ve ever used Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, you already know more than you necessarily need. And a demo download of FontLab Studio – the professional level font editor referenced in the book – is available for Mac and Windows free.

Here’s a little piece to give you an idea of the tone:

“My plan is to go through my decision making process so you can do the same as you develop your fonts. There is no right or wrong here. All you have to guide you in the process is your personal sense of style – what’s right and wrong.”

Practical Font Design, The Links:

Amazon Print and Kindle

Lulu PDF

Lulu Paperback

David Bergsland sells his fonts at:

Hackberry-Fonts

And blogs here, dispensing technical tips and helpful font-making tools:

Hackberry-Fonts Blog

Steve Jobs Role In Typography By Computer

Richard Fink — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:21:37 +0000

A few weeks ago, my eye doctor said to me, “I only know of two people who know anything about fonts, you and Steve Jobs.” Seemed Dr. Patel was re-doing his web site and had questions about the qualities of Trebuchet MS. But the line about Jobs raised an eyebrow, naturally, and it was as I suspected – Dr. Patel had read Jobs’ commencement address to the Stanford graduating class of 2005, the relevant portion of which follows:

“Reed College [where Steve Jobs enrolled for awhile] at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.

Setting The Record Straight

A lot of people know that Benjamin Franklin did research on electricity. The silhouette of Franklin in a lightning storm with his kite flying and key dangling is emblazoned on the average American’s brain: the rugged individualist in pursuit of a dream, no matter the danger. But what almost nobody knows is that Franklin’s work on electricity was as a part of a team of co-equals. And that his signature was only one of several others’ that appeared upon publication of that work. But Franklin had the fame and got the credit. Sound familiar? History is a single-sentence thing.

A lone eagle, as an icon, works great. A flock of geese, not so much.

FinksLinks: Pre-Approved For Your Reading Pleasure

Here’s a couple of articles to help put it all in perspective:

The Impact of Steve Jobs on Typography

Steve Jobs and Type: Connecting the Dots

And here, on Typophile.com, a bit of additional insight, debate, and perhaps a few ruffled feathers: Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Kernest’s Konstellations

Richard Fink — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 03:44:49 +0000

Here’s a unique Christmas gift idea for the web designer you love.
Web designer Garrick Van Buren – the man behind the web font service site Kernest – is offering a new way to explore web fonts and web typography using a template based approach. It’s called Konstellations.

Konstellations: A Way Into Web Fonts

Each month you get a whole web fonts feast for your inspiration, education, and delectation. Custom designed by Garrick to show @font-face at its best. And complete with everything you need to dig in – the style sheets, the fonts, and the HTML. Want a taste? Lookee here.

Garrick has a unique aesthetic sensibility and I’m greatly looking forward to seeing what he comes up with each month as the subscription moves on.

Sound Good? Want To Know More?

Check out Unmatchedstyle.com for a video chat with Garrick along with review of Konstellations and Kernest.

Practical Font Design by David Bergsland

Richard Fink — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:37:45 +0000

Practical Font Design
2nd Edition For Fontlab 5

If you’re looking for a brief, straightforward introduction to fonts, I recommend David Bergsland’s Practical Font Design. Unlike a lot of books that make you feel like you’re seated in the back row of a crowded lecture hall, this one feels like a private tutorial.
Bergsland takes you inside his studio, sits you down, and talks you through the basics. It keeps to a schedule, too: no bullshit.

If you’ve gone looking for information about fonts, you may have noticed that there’s a lot of information about typefaces but not much about the technology of font-making. And what info there is, is scattered piecemeal here and there. And most of it is decidedly not for newbies, either. So unfortunately, in the field of fonts today, it doesn’t take much to stand out. That said, this is still a good book, and I wish there were more like it from other designers, offering other perspectives. There’s also a newly published Practical Font Design:Part II, that I’ll be buying, as well. In it, Bergsland describes, in detail, the creation of a nine font serif font-family and a companion sans serif.

Fink v. Bergsland: What You Won’t Find In The Book

Before web fonts and the explosion of e-reading devices like the Kindle, the iPhone, and the iPad, nearly every font designer on earth was concerned exclusively with how their fonts looked in print. And most days, it still seems that nearly every font designer on earth is concerned exclusively with how their fonts look in print.

I work with fonts a lot. And I’m concerned almost exclusively with how they look onscreen, in web browsers. And so I ask myself sometimes: “Is it me, or is the world crazy?”

In the book, Bergsland has this to say:

“Do I use hinting? NO: Hinting is the minute adjustments to outline position and size to make the font more readable on the screen at small sizes. I do not design fonts for the screen. There are companies that specialize in this minutia. Ascender Corp is the most famous. They design the fonts for Microsoft (among others) including fonts like Verdana, Calibri, and many more. I just hit the Auto Hinting command before I export the fonts (if I remember). I know. I should be more responsible. Right? But it really does not matter for my purposes. A font that reads well on the screen is far too heavy and clunky to be used in printed books.”

Now, note that this book was published just this year – in 2010. So my initial reaction was: where has this guy been for the past year and half? Under a rock? How relevant does he expect his “purposes” to remain as time goes by?

But wait, there’s more:

“I really could care less about TrueType at this point. I export those formats for both operating systems (Mac & PC). but I just do it as a service to possible customers. I really don’t support this archaic format.”

Ok, so let me get this straight… you, Bergsland, focus exclusively on fonts to be printed with ink on dead trees. But the TrueType format – which, no matter how much teeth gnashing it causes at Adobe is still the dominant and technically superior format for the screen – TrueType is archaic? Yeah, I guess you’re right. What kind of lowbrow weirdo would read from a screen anyway? No future in that, obviously. Stop it right now! And Håkon, pack up your CSS stuff ’cause according to this guy, it’s time to pack it in.
BTW, I’ve heard “archaic” aimed at TrueType before – from a well-known type designer, too. It must be a talking point making the rounds.

Web Fonts, Print Fonts, Beggar Man, Thief

I’ve felt for quite some time – never otherwise, actually – that the whole rigmarole about fonts on the web exposing font designers to easy piracy was based on a number of dubious premises. One premise being that fonts designed for print could just be slapped up on web servers and that would mean prices for print fonts would drop because, heck, why pay for it if you can browse around the web and cherry pick endlessly with no price tag attached? (There’s huge flaws in that scenario from the get go, but let’s leave it alone.) Well, David Bergsland obviously believes there’s a divide between fonts for web and fonts for print. Me too.
Others, as well. I recently found myself re-reading the following from a blog post in 2009 by a guy named Yves Peters:

“With some notable exceptions, modern typeface families are print tools. The designers of them spend three weeks in a cubbyhole creating hundreds (or thousands) of kerning pairs because they’re being used at 1200dpi, not 75, 85 or 100dpi (or whatever nominal DPI rate your OS uses). Those traps he or she slaved over aren’t going to be worth a damn on your LCD, whether it be a lowly eeePC or a Mac Pro, as they’ll be displayed at 11pt on a browser who’s developer didn’t give two hoots about its type rendering capabilities. And you can kiss goodbye to those subtle shifts in line contrast, or those delicate little serifs. Those hairlines will recede faster than Ian Hislop’s before a high court judge.”

Minus the swipe at browser developers who don’t care about type rendering capabilities, quite true, I think. Even as screen resolutions improve – like the iPhone’s Retina display – it will still largely always be true. Luminescent screens will never be like paper and ink. There’s no reason to think that they should be. And the reason I spend my time almost exclusively on fonts for the screen is because the sooner we don’t have to use ink on dead trees because there’s no practical alternative, the better off we will be.

Lastly, a tip: in one chapter, Bergsland writes about testing fonts – testing meaning printing them out, of course – and of the need to keep re-installing them in the operating system as they evolve.
This is surely outmoded. In my experience, HTML pages using print style sheets with the font-sizes specified in pt (to get the point sizes in between the pixel sizes) will suffice for the bulk of testing.
I test fonts in browsers all day. I’ve never installed a font for testing purposes yet.
But if it’s an OTF or TTF and you’re using Internet Explorer 9+, make sure you set the embedding bits to “Installable”. The wise folks at Microsoft are making that a precondition, for some stupid reason. Ahh, but then again, Bergsland’s book says to set the embedding bits to installable right from the start! I guess he didn’t get the email from Redmond. Or else maybe he’s one of those libré free-the-font commies. Anyway, the book’s certainly worth the 13 bucks. IMHO.

The Future Of Reading

Richard Fink — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:49:00 +0000

Rochester, NY
On the two planes I had to take to get from Florida to Rochester, I was reading the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig I downloaded (for free, natch) and then transferred to my iRex 1000 e-reader using a custom formatted PDF from Feedbooks.

The illustrations in the PDF edition are missing. Sometimes the iRex skips pages inexplicably. The iRex has no network connectivity. But still, what Lessig has to say is making its way into my brain. Maybe I’ll compare the Mobi or EPUB editions from Feedbooks on the iPad with what I’ve got on the iRex in a future post.

The iRex 1000 is the largest e-paper device around and looks like this:

Thus have I prepared myself through hands-on encounters of the frustrating kind to discuss the future of reading here at the Future Of Reading Conference. It’s being held at the Rochester Institute Of Technology and starts tonight with a kick-off talk and book signing from author Margaret Atwood whose work I am not familiar with but will be by tonight – maybe even convincingly so – through the magic of search engines and Wikipedia.

What, Nothing About the Readable Web Redesign?

Regular readers might have noticed that I’ve upped my blogging game a bit with a redesign. Still not quite tweaked to absolute web perfection but soon, soon. (Done with the aid of Joshua Wold of Sabramedia – to give credit where credit is due.)

Readable Web At AnEventApart, Boston

Richard Fink — Sun, 23 May 2010 16:05:23 +0000

Boston, Massachusetts Readable Web is getting out of the office this year. I’ll be attending and reporting on a wide variety of events.

Starting with:

AnEventApart, Boston

I’ve never attended one of Zeldman & Meyer’s traveling road shows before and I can’t wait. The event kicks off tonight with a meet and greet at the Westin Copley Hotel sponsored by Extensis who is here to preview their new web font service WebInk.

Over the next few days I’ll be posting pics, twittering, muttering, commenting about just how tall Jeff Veen really looks in person, and reporting on everything and anything that happens to spark an idea in my brain.

Details on this conference and upcoming Event Apart conferences here.

Update: After-Conference Thoughts

Call it what you want: web design, digital publishing, whatever – the problems exist on two levels.

Problem 1: Cutting The Bullshit

This problem is not unique to digital publishing but to all publishing: staying on message, staying focused, writing clearly, keeping it brief – all the trite truisms are just as true today as they were when David Ogilvy wrote Ogilvy On Advertising in 1983 and Rudolph Flesch wrote The Art Of Readable Writing in 1949. Nobody is going to give you or your product more than a passing glance. At least at first. Waste people’s time and they’re gone. Click.

This is why I perked up when Luke Wroblewski argued that you should design your small-screen mobile experience first and build your desktop experience from that kernel. I agree. Working from the inside out like that imposes a discipline that would probably not exist if you started with the desktop experience. And if you can’t seem to cut it all down to it’s essence for an iPhone or Android, it’s time to ask yourself why the site exists in the first place.

Problem 2: Re-Tasking Content For Different Devices And Screen Sizes

It used to be that the difference between user agents (browsers) was the thing that drove web authors crazy. Yes, there are still issues, but it’s easy to envision a time in the near future when that won’t be anything more than an occasional and minor annoyance. The monster facing us now is different devices and screen sizes. This is a tough one – and the mental tools publishers need are just beginning to coalesce.

Recently, on Typophile.com, designer John Hudson made the observation that, to him, websites in general resembled scrapbooks. For some reason I’ve been thinking about that comment a lot and finally realized why: minus the negative connotations of the word “scrap”, they are scrapbooks. Chunks of information being fed in and out from disparate sources on the network and placed together on the same “page”. The equivalent of taking chunks of five or six pages of a book or magazine and pasting them together. Even in an era of relatively high resolution screens this will still be the case. Content must be chunked so it can reflow into its container. And connectedness is a requirement – the idea of an “e-book” on an “e-reader” disconnected from the net is already preposterous – even though we’ll be living with that situation for some time to come.

I got a new TV delivered today. It’s connected to the network, too. A TV with web apps. A giant iPad. Who’d a thunk?

And, oh, yeah. Just to cap off AnEventApart, Boston:

How Tall Is Jeffrey Veen?

Meeting Jeff Veen in person was a bit of a shock, really. For a guy who writes and speaks about all this web stuff, turns out the guy’s tall enough to be my father!

Oops, Capped Off Too Soon

[A Bit More On An EventApart, Boston] Here’s a nice roundup of the event called Themes From AnEventApart Boston with a link also, to Luke Wroblewski’s extensive notes from the conference. Also, Luke and the concept of “Mobile First” gets a treatment on the Big Web Show.

Developing With Web Standards by John Allsopp

Richard Fink — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:00:50 +0000

Required Reading

In his book, the Blind Watchmaker, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins writes:

— Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; and you can explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones. To do the latter, it sometimes isn’t enough to lay the evidence before the reader in a dispassionate way. You have to become an advocate and use the tricks of the advocate’s trade.

John Allsopp knows the tricks. And luckily, for those of us who work with things web, his field is web development. If you want to know what’s going on today and in the near term, Developing With Web Standards will take you through it all, step by step.

Snapshots And More

Like its “sister” volume, Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman and Ethan Marcotte, Developing With Web Standards is like flipping through a book of “snapshots”. Each chapter gives you a picture of one aspect of web technology along with the occasional zoom-in on things of particular importance. Seasoned web developers will find in it a valuable review. And no matter how much you know, or how familiar you think you are with something, I guarantee that at some point you’ll find yourself thinking:

“Hey, I didn’t know that. Why didn’t I know that?” Hah!

For myself, I found the chapter on Canvas and SVG especially useful because, frankly, I haven’t paid much attention to Canvas and SVG. (Is there such a thing as keeping up with it all?) And since the book is liberally sprinkled with links and sources for further study, I not only get John’s expert analysis, but a leg-up on how to learn more.

I would also recommend it highly for people who are only vaguely familiar with web development and would like to learn. It’s not a basic primer by any stretch, but it’s written in a friendly and clear style that helps a lot when you’re trying to make sense of a thing for the first time. Yes, you will learn some things, but more importantly, you’ll come away with a clear idea of what it is you don’t know. And when you’re new to field of knowledge, finding out what it is you don’t know can be the hardest part.

The Soul Of An Educator

In addition to authoring, publishing, and software development, John Allsopp is co-founder of Web Directions – which puts together incredible conferences on web development all around the world.

When I grow up, my ambition is to speak at a Web Directions conference and get to rub shoulders with people like John Resig, Steve Souder, and Mark Boulton.

John Allsopp, good luck with the book.

Designing With Web Standards, Third Edition

Richard Fink — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:00:18 +0000

Required Reading

As used by Jeffrey Zeldman and co-author Ethan Marcotte, the term “web standards” is a catchphrase that refers to writing web pages using, as a basis, a group of free and open technical specifications. The core specs being HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Think of them as the three legs of a tripod upon which all else rests. In no way futuristic, this has already happened. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are at the heart of publishing in the 21st century. DWWS3 is largely about authoring with these and other related specs in smart and efficient ways that could, more simply and accurately, be labeled best practice. The first edition of DWWS in 2003 was in large part a work of advocacy. But six Internet years have passed and today it’s mainstream. As the link says, Required Reading.

Finding The Cost Of Freedom

I’m a New York City kid raised in Brooklyn. When I was small, I used to wait out on the stoop for my Dad to come home from work. The first thing he did was check the mailbox. And I remember a day when the mail contained his yearly income tax statement. Now, paying taxes is fodder for many a sitcom joke, so even as a little kid I knew people liked to complain about taxes. But my Dad had a more accepting, even appreciative attitude. I asked him how he felt about it and he said, “It’s just the price of being of being an American, that’s all.” My Dad, a child of the Great Depression, son of immigrant parents, and a Jew, felt that whatever the tax, it was more than a fair bargain for his own personal slice of the American dream.

People who come to web design from backgrounds in print – where the physical size of the page is known ahead of time, and where precise, physical, “optical” sizes rule, and where 550 years of technological development lend stability and certainty to the end result – are often shocked by the lack of precision and uniformity that you have to deal with in web design. Likewise shocked are programmers who are used to a black and white world where the code is either error-free and compilable, or not. And who are used to writing installable programs with access to features of the operating system that web pages don’t have.
For these folks, the guesswork and workarounds and accommodations of web design seem insane. In the face of this uncertainty and unpredictability they ask, “Why is it like this? Why?”

Because there is no central authority – like Microsoft – to dictate what is “correct” or “incorrect”, that’s why. A consensus must be reached and that takes time. And because we are moving, today, through a transitional corridor, that’s why. We’re going to get it wrong or almost right for awhile before we get it quite right. That’s one of the reasons I write this blog.

I wasn’t always convinced, but I am now, that precision and predictability in web design will come in time. One of the reasons is the perceptible change in mood since the first edition of Zeldman’s book was published in 2003. In the battle for the hearts and minds of web authors, standards have won. The idea that the on-ramp to the information superhighway should remain free and clear of the encumbrances of proprietary technology – copyrights, patents, and so forth – has not only won, but in the minds of young developers, it’s a given. Twenty years ago, the default was having to pay a license fee and free was unusual. Today, the default is free and paying for a license, the exception. Developers fresh out of college have trouble even comprehending any credo other than “share and share alike”.
It took a few governmental smacks upside the head to achieve it, but even within Microsoft – with regards to the core of Internet Explorer, at least – I believe the idea of keeping browser technology a commercial no-fly zone has finally won out.

And so, I look upon the current need for hacks and workarounds and forking and sniffing and object detection the way my Dad did paying income taxes: it’s the price of freedom, and of the urgent need to keep the Internet as free and open to all as it can be.
It’s a price I have to pay right now, as an author, for my slice of opportunity.

Jeffrey Zeldman, Ethan Marcotte, good luck with the book.

E-Textbooks Get Kickstart From Governor Of California

Richard Fink — Sun, 10 May 2009 18:26:59 +0000

Nothing quite like a leg-up from the government to get things moving…

“Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today launched an initiative to make California the first state in the nation to offer schools free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students. The Governor directed his Secretary of Education Glen Thomas to ensure these resources are available for use in high school math and science classes by fall 2009, a critical first step in helping ensure digital textbooks are widely available to all California students.”

A turning point in moving from print to the network screen?

Read the Governator’s press release.

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