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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.

Web Typography, Simply Smashing

Richard Fink — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 01:12:13 +0000

Lists of resources in bibliographies, footnotes, endnotes and the like have long been commonplace in print. And in the academic world, citations are a must. But in the bad old days before the web, unless you had an insane amount of time on your hands and a large first-rate library nearby, as a reader, such lists were, as a practical matter, just that: lists. It could take you a day or a week or longer to track down the full text of just one citation depending upon how obscure the source.
Really, kids, that’s how it was. No Google Books. Imagine.

One of the amazing things about Hypertext is that nothing need remain obscure. The full text of any citation is now just a click away. (Or in these days of mobility, just a tap away. While love remains, as always, just a kiss away, kiss away. But I digress.) Instantaneity (that a word? it should be), meaning the ability to immediately retrieve the source of a citation, has given rise to a new genre born of it: the Hyperlink “roundup”.

Hyperlink Roundups

More than just a list with brief summaries attached – [think People Magazine's "Top Fifty" lists and the like] – on the web, when done right, roundups deliver not just a world of information, but a full-blown solar system. Citations become, for the first time, a practical proposition. For anyone who’s used a browser for more than ten minutes, the process feels so natural that you don’t even pause for a “Wow!”. But a wow it deserves.
Now, if you’re into web design, you probably already know that nobody puts together roundups better than Smashing Magazine. It’s their specialty.

Web Typography: 100 Educational Resources, Tools and Techniques

Check out Web Typography: 100 Educational Resources, Tools and Techniques. I found that just reading the titles and summaries helped put a finger to the pulse of where web typography stands today. But the real beauty is that there’s nothing preventing you from spending weeks, months really, following the links and absorbing all the information that orbits around a piece like this.

[BTW - I was both surprised and pleased that I garnered 2 out of the 100 citations: one was my article Web Fonts At The Crossing published on AListApart and another was Font Hinting Explained By A Font Design Master here at RW. Cool. I’ll take any shred of validation I can get, wherever I can get it.

Next. . .

Zoltan (User Agent Man) Hawryluk Roundups Ruby Text

Hey, “roundup” works as a verb, too! My confrere in things rasterizable, Zoltan “Du Lac” Hawryluk, wrote a piece on Ruby Text: Cross Browser HTML5 Ruby Annotations Using CSS. Ruby text is annotative text that hovers above the main text and looks like this:

With the Ruby annotation, now I finally know how to pronounce Zoltan’s surname. Slick.
First supported in IE5 – yup, IE5, ya can bitch all you want about IE but when it came to text handling features it was ahead of its time – Ruby text now has broad support. Bookmark it: along with many other typographic features, Ruby’s time is a comin’.
And if you’re into browser tech, User Agent Man is certainly worth a spot on your feed list.
Zoltan’s got the right stuff. Insightful.

Next. . .

Typedia Marches On

As I’ve written before, roundups on the Typedia Blog by Eric Vorhes and others continue to do a bang up job keeping geeks like me abreast of developments in web typography. Less time searching around, more time listening to Miles. I dig it.
Feed me, Seymour.

And a Happy Turkey to all.

Typedia: A Font Resource In The Making

Richard Fink — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:29:32 +0000

Last year sometime, Typedia showed up on the radar here at Readable Web. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, frankly. No tag line. What’s the focus? What’s the angle? But the people behind it had gravitas in the world of web so I figured maybe I was missing something. I kept an eye out.

Lately, that’s been paying off. The posts on the Typedia Blog by Erik Vorhes have been top notch, by my lights. Enlightening reading with enriching links. This son-of-a-gun is puttin’ me to shame, really. And so……. may we have a drumroll pleeeeeeese……. I have added Typedia to the Linkworthy blogroll here at Readable Web.

What’s Typedia? Well the font loving folks who created it say this:

In a nutshell, Typedia is a community website to classify typefaces and educate people about them. Think of it like a mix between IMDb and Wikipedia, but just for type. Anyone can join, add, and edit pages for typefaces or for the people behind the type.
We love type, and we have a burning desire to learn as much as possible about typefaces: where they come from, who made them, and why they look the way they do. We want everyone to be able to share in that rich knowledge and enjoy the art and artists of type design. Over time, we think Typedia could grow into a great educational resource for people to learn about their favorite typefaces and discover new ones.

Got A Yen For A Yin, Yang?

If you’re into fonts, web fonts, type, typography, web design and stuff like that there, check it out and get involved. Typophile is a great and unique resource, too, let’s not forget. But for every Yin there’s gotta be a Yang.

Dang!

John Daggett On CSS3 At TypeCon, 2010

Richard Fink — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 17:10:03 +0000

John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks and Christopher Slye of Adobe arranged a briefing – a guide to the perplexed – by Firefox developer and editor of the W3C CSS3 Fonts Module, John Daggett.

John Daggett has kindly posted his slides.
Dave Crossland has kindly posted his notes.
Photos of the event are posted in an album on Readable Web’s Facebook photo gallery.

California Dreamin’

As Simon Daniels of Microsoft put it on the TypeCon feed, these links are the closest thing to having been there “minus the element of spending a sunny afternoon in an underground bunker with a bunch of geeky web font geeks”.
This is true. But we emerged from the bunker with good tidings: the CSS3 Fonts Module has come a long way and Daggett says there’s a possibility it will move to Candidate Recommendation status by the end of this year. Truly impressive and unusually speedy work by the WG and its panel of Invited Experts. Many parts of the draft will be implemented in IE9 and Firefox 4. With other browser makers expected to follow. As John Hudson said during the Web Fonts panel discussion a few days later, “The standards process works.”
Considering the pessimism last year, quite amazing.

Web typography and a standards process that works. Wow++.

TypeCon 2010: A New Birth Of Type

Richard Fink — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:10:59 +0000

As good as digital gets there is still no replacement for face-to-face. Never will be. The only thing that a human really understands is other humans. Facial expression, tone of voice, body language – the real people deal – there’s just no way to get that from afar. Technology allows us to adopt a persona in our communications, and the only way past that is to be there.
Ya gotta get out of the office.

The Past Has Passed

It’s amazing how much has changed since last year. Here at TypeCon, there is a new mood: a growing acceptance that the future of fonts is onscreen. A feeling of relief is in the air. Decisions have been made. Last night, in a keynote kick-off, Roger Black of the Font Bureau focused on screen fonts and, with optimism, stated the obvious – that the font industry has to rethink the business of type because there is no going back. Roger was understandably a little light on details but the last slide in his accompanying Powerpoint demo was a price: “99 Cents”

News And Links

Webtype

Webtype, a partnership between Font Bureau and Ascender Corp, has finally launched. Without even looking, I know the fonts look good. Webtype has a blog, too. See: New Web Font Service Launched by Partnership of Experts
FinkTip: Stop with the “we are the experts” stuff. Nobody cares. Self-congratulatory mumbo doesn’t convince anybody of anything. (Unless you’re trying to convince yourself, which is really what sales copy like that is about.) Pronouncements from on high about your own expertise doesn’t work onscreen. It only undermines the effort.
And if I see from anybody, “use fonts legally” as marketing pitch, I’m going to scream. I’m screaming right now. You might as well hang a sign that says, “Hack me, please!” And how many potential customers, pray tell, are even going to understand what you’re talking about? This is just the reality. Why not be explicit and tell customers that if they don’t do business with you, they could potentially get sued? That would be charming, eh? Either get into it, in detail, or cut the FUD. It just detracts.

Fontfonter

Some guys from Fontshop have put together a web font preview site called FontFonter which lets you see their fonts as applied to external sites. Conspicuously missing is support for Internet Explorer. I don’t think it’s a technical issue but I could be wrong. I have noticed an ideological bias – unstated, but certainly there – against Internet Explorer at Fontshop. I don’t know if it’s a beef with Microsoft in general, or what.
I’ll be trying to get to the bottom of it and will report. [Update: see report that follows]

FinkRetract: (Concerning the deleted above) I met up with Stephen Coles and Ivo Gabrowitsch of Fontshop today and was assured that there is no bias against IE and that Fontfonter’s lack of support for IE is purely technical. They just can’t make the font swap-out work in IE. And they are quite glad that Microsoft held the line and helped bring about WOFF so no biases there, either. Love is in the air. My bad for reading into things.

Typecon Pics On Facebook

I’ve been trying to get a handle on my new Canon Rebel X4 camera – and dammit I’m going to do it no matter how long it takes – and have been posting pics on Readable Web’s Facebook Page. Check it out. You might be tagged!

Good Web Fonts

Educator Laura Franz – who I met last night – has put together a side-by-side comparison site for body fonts called Good Web Fonts. Great idea. Check it out.

The Web Font Awards – A Contest

Monotype Imaging will be sponsoring a web fonts contest. The site is called Web Font Awards. Brand new. No details as yet. Kudos to Monotype for this idea. The world holds one surprise after another. Now how do we get more web designers to attend a conference like this? Two hour Web Font “panels” are fine but in the world Roger Black is describing, fonts on the web are the main event with two hour panels on print fonts.

Harvey Pekar In A Time Before Google

Richard Fink — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:40:23 +0000

Harvey Pekar, Not Long
After We Met

Comic Book innovator Harvey Pekar died last month at the age of 70. I met Harvey a long time ago when I was a young musician and on-and-off student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. This was well before his comic book series American Splendor, or his appearances on David Letterman, or the HBO movie with actor Paul Giamatti as Harvey. I didn’t hear about his death until about a week after it happened. But eerily, I had been thinking about him on the day he died: my blog post that day – On Facebook, Nobody Knows You’re A Dick – reminded me of a very funny riff Harvey did in the movie about other people named Harvey Pekar listed in the Cleveland phonebook.
(It’s PEE-kar, BTW – and American Splendor is a cute movie, watch it.)

But still I couldn’t figure out what I could possibly add to the existing obituaries that would make any sense here on Readable Web. Then I got to remembering…

A Jazz Maven First

A Frame From His 2003 NY Times Op-Ed Piece

I only met him once and briefly. But well before that, I heard about him from mutual friends and fellow musicians. Harvey said this, Harvey said that – voiced with a combination of reverence and awe. Harvey was a legend in the Cleveland jazz scene. A local whose articles and reviews had been published in Downbeat and Jazz Review! His knowledge of jazz was encyclopedic. An entire room was set aside for his record collection. Harvey was The Jazz Maven, The Expert. And in the days before the web, before mobile phones, before damned near everything or so it feels like when I think back to that time – the maven was invaluable: a human search engine. If you wanted info on the best recordings by a particular jazz artist, or you wanted to know the names of the sidemen on a particular record because the record jacket didn’t say – you could get answers or at least clues from Harvey Pekar.

By the time I met him, he was in his mid thirties and had stopped writing about jazz. He was writing about politics – or so I heard. He was still acquiring jazz recordings, though – out of habit. Years later, I read an article about American Splendor and, at first, wondered if it was the same Harvey Pekar I met in Cleveland. Frankly, I thought the idea of an autobiographical comic book was weird. And after all, I had an unremarkable existence of my own to keep me entertained, thanks, and that was enough. But American Splendor slowly gathered a cult following. It caught on. It led to appearances on Letterman and Harvey became a minor celebrity. It’s a pretty unique individual who can turn being a nobody into a basis for fame. In retrospect, American Splendor foreshadowed the personal blog and reality TV.

But being a jazz maven/search engine was Harvey’s start. Cartoonist Robert Crumb was a jazz fan, too, and that was the connection that initially brought them together. Today, the local maven doesn’t count for anything. No, you can’t get insight from a search engine but it will lead you to all the relevant data you could possibly process in a lifetime. Plus a list of mavens all over the world who’ve already processed parts of it and are happy to share their insights. In ten years, if you try to explain to someone who was my age at the time I met Harvey, that asking a human was once your first and sometimes only path to information, they might not believe you. And they certainly won’t be able to comprehend it.

Oh yeah… I met Harvey when he stopped by the house I was living in to connect with my friend, teacher, and house-mate Willis Lyman – one of the best double bass players in town at the time. I think they were heading to a party or a gig, or something. We sat around shooting the breeze for five or ten minutes while Willis finished getting ready. We talked a little about jazz, and made some wisecracks. Just two guys killing time, shooting the breeze. I remember him unusually clearly – that’s what’s odd. True to the spirit of American Splendor and Harvey’s legacy, it was completely mundane yet worthy of note.

No related posts.

FontCONF In Minneapolis/St. Paul

Richard Fink — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 11:53:43 +0000

It’s Tomorrow, And Free. Please come.

If you’re in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area and you’re into design, web design, web fonts, fonts, typography, or anything at all like the forementioned, please come to FontCONF tomorrow, Saturday, June 19th at:
CoCo – Coworking and Collaborative Space
213 4th St E., St Paul, MN

FontCONF

Organized by Garrick Van Buren of the font service and download site Kernest, a great time is guaranteed for all.

In the morning, font designer Chank Deisel will be leading a session where an entire font will be constructed as a collaborative effort. As part of a team, I’ll also be facilitating a session in the afternoon. There will be surprises. Fun. Laughter and learning.

Greatly looking forward to it. Hope you can come.

Addendum To Conference:

As some readers of this blog know, an article I wrote about fonts on the web was published on AlistApart Magazine about ten days ago. Unfortunately, Bill Davis of font producer Ascender Corp, took issue with some of the things I wrote about Ascender’s new web font services.

As it turned out, Bill flew in from Chicago to a attend FontCONF, and I’m sorry to report that all the bad blood boiled over, things got completely out of hand, and there was a brawl. Luckily, someone had a camera and captured the incident:

Davis and Fink square off with scornful laughter, each confident of victory.

Witneses to this unfortunate confrontation included font designers Mark Simonson, Stu Sandler, and Chank Deisel. However, after a delicious dinner at a nearby steak house in St. Paul, both men declined to press charges.

Old Farts, New Media

Richard Fink — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 15:48:00 +0000

Rochester, New York

Over the past two days here at the Future Of Reading Conference at RIT there’s been two talks by publishing industry insiders – Molly Barton of Penguin Books and Jane Friedman, former longtime President and CEO of Harper Collins Publishers Worldwide.

There’s a big difference in age between them. One of them is young and one of them is, well, probably a grandmother. (Didn’t ask, but she mentioned she had four sons.) One of them understands where the publishing of books is headed and the other one seemed a little stodgy, frankly.

Here’s what they look like. Guess who’s clued in, who’s not:

Jane Friedman, Clued In

In the days of print, competition between the major publishers could afford to be a “gentlemanly” affair. But in these days of digital and print-on-demand, it’s guerrilla warfare. Jane Friedman brought up the fact that there’s 80,000 independent publishers in the USA. Twice. She gets it. And she gets the change in mood, too. It’s not just digital distribution, there’s a change in expectations. Many readers want to feel a relationship, a connection to the author. A name on a book cover isn’t enough. And readers want to get the book they want, whenever they want it, on whatever device they’re using, wherever they are. She gets that, too.

Jane Friedman is co-founder of start-up publisher Open Road Integrated Media. And for the first time, they are publishing digitally, with no accompanying print edition, Negotiating With Evil, by Mitchell Reiss.
Let me say that again: no simultaneous print edition.

Hey Jane, How ‘Bout DRM?

After her presentation, I asked Friedman if all of Open Road’s titles were DRM’d (Kindle, Nook, etc) and she said that at the moment, all of them were. I asked if they were considering releasing anything under trusting, open licenses and she said it wasn’t out of the question but that Open Road is a very new company, give it time, and certainly anything and everything that gets books into the hands of the most readers and generates revenue for the authors is on the table.

OK. Maybe someday I’ll be able to quote a paragraph or two without jumping through hoops. (Or, alternatively, downloading the cracked edition which we all know will exist. Not condoning, just saying.) But in the meantime, it’s refreshing to see somebody with long experience thinking anew and acting anew.

Next, more from the conference: Chris Anderson of Wired, Jon Orwant of Google Books, and my new hero, old fart Richard Lanham, Professor Emeritus at UCLA.

A Nice Use Of Web Fonts In Mainstream Media