Type design legend John Berry writes in about his upcoming panel on Web font embedding: "It's all about getting new fonts onto a web page, so the content doesn't all end up in default Times or Arial. After a wide-ranging but inconclusive panel on web fonts at TypeCon in July, this time around some of the browser makers will be represented -- and the focus will widen to include *how* fonts are used on the web. "
I hope they put this on the web afterward!
Where: Typ09, the 2009 ATypI conference, Mexico City
When: 26-30 October (web-fonts program on Thursday, 29 October, at Anáhuac University campus)
Web fonts: the talk of Typ09 (Thanks, John!)
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I can honestly say I have never thought "What this website needs is a different font". However, I have on many occasions thought "What this website needs is to stop trying to look pixel-for-pixel the same on every device". I don't see this helping.
Whatever they come up with, it'll take Firefox a week to support it, and take IE a decade.
asuffield, you're clearly not a graphic designer. One of the most challenging things about visual design for the web is the inability to make a layout look the way you intended it to because of needless limitations on how type is displayed. That's one reason that some designers end up turning to Flash out of pure desperation.
Here's audio from the TypeCon panel in July which was indeed inconclusive, but it's a good introduction for anyone wanting to get a snapshot of where we were until now.
I can guarantee that there will be much more to the story in Mexico City.
Firefox has already announced that version 3.6 will have support for WOFF, the font format most foundries prefer for web font distribution.
The most challenging thing about visual design for the web is to get out of this mindset where you must make everything look the way you intended it to.
There is no way your website is going to look the same on my 26" desktop screen and my 3" palmtop screen. Trying to make it look the same - or worse, trying to detect and display one of two different versions - just makes an unusable mess, with text overflowing boxes and layouts getting scrambled because their pixel-by-pixel approach doesn't work in the heterogeneous world of web clients. The web is designed around the concept of describing the structure of a document, which will then look different on each client, according to the capabilities of that system.
Good designers understand this. Bad designers don't get it and use 1x1 spacer images or flash, in their attempts to make the web be a newspaper.
@Brainspore, the correct professional to consult for web design is a web designer, not a graphic designer who learned on paper.
The web is not paper. The web is very much not paper. Attempting to use paper graphic design approaches on the web leads to abominations that don't work.
That's not to say that web design isn't a specialty; it is. Making a website that both looks good and works well is a job for a professional. It's just a different specialty than graphic design on paper.
@asuffield you are presuming designer intention for the layout is not for it be different on every browser. @sabik is right in his comment that the web is not paper. The designer's role is to have some influence over how best to display the content (or do you browse without your own custom style sheet.)
@sabik that is naive to say that graphic designers learned on paper. This is to say the the web designer (or team) does not have to take on the role of a graphic designer. It is vital that a good web designer be a good graphic designer, or be aided by one. Graphic design is a massively complex subjective topic but the best of which appears invisible to most.
I am surprised by the friction advances in web typography receives from, as @brainspore implied, non-designers. Nobody is saying this is going to stop bad design. It is going to let the web mature as a medium. There is better typographic alternatives for most jobs than what is available currently. Some designers will make bad font selections, others choices that will make true enhancements for all. I'm looking forward to it sorting the men from the boys. Or should I say sorting those that think they can be a great web deisgner without being a graphic designer to those that don't.
> I hope the put this on the web afterward!
They would, but they can't get the rights to the fonts.
Mark nails it.
I'm pretty sure than John D. Berry is aware that the web is not paper, that different browsers render the same code differently, and that web users want control over their displays. Just sayin'.
I've personally never been understood why fonts were such a huge deal. For logos, advertising, all the many other reasons, sure. But when I'm reading an article or info off a page, I'm happy as long as it's readable.
The biggest problem is that web designers do not study typography. Giving them the ability to select any old font just means they'll select the wrong one. They'll have the ability to ignore hundreds of years of typography knowledge just because they think they have a Better Idea. As an example of getting things wrong, there is no such thing as a "font-family" in typography. It is left as an exercise to the reader to find the correct term.
@Brainspore I'm not a graphic designer either, but I have lots of experience of being a *user* of webpages, and what I want most from their design is to let ME control how they display on MY system. If I want a different typeface I'll go select one. Just give me the content with the absolute bare minimum of form necessary for it to make sense, please.
@asuffield First, web designers can, do, and should customize type styles for different media. It's not hard for a website to recognize whether a visitor is viewing the site on IE6, a mobile device, or is about to print a hard copy and swap in the most appropriate CSS.
Second, there are methods being developed that allow for both user control and designer intent. Something like SIFr (http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/), though fairly burdensome from a developer's perspective, allows for any typeface to be used on a modern browser and still have the type searchable, readable by screen readers, and changable should the user not like the result.
In other words, just because type design for the web still has challenges to address doesn't mean you have to resign yourself to Arial forever.
@shawnhcorey Many, many web designers have and do study typography. We don't ignore "hundreds of years of typography knowledge" as you presume, we follow basic usability guidelines and design web sites to load as fast as possible as well as work for screen readers for the blind. Many of us also design sites to work across multiple countries and languages and that requires the use of a web font in order to minimize the development time and cost it requires to make graphics for every single header/title, etc for each country. Trust me, I've created sites that have to work in over 26 countries. Creating graphics in each language is a nightmare for me and the front-end developers who have to ensure all the ALT tags are included for every language.
The best web designers consider usability first, then use the tools they have to create the most beautiful design on top of that. And P.S., we didn't create the "font-family" any more than we created HTML and the rules it imposes. We simply follow those rules in order for everyone to access a site, not just graphic/web designers with perfect vision, dexterity and a grasp of typography.
Hopefully if you plan on designing for the Web you will take some educational courses and realize the rules that make it accessible for everyone are the same ones that make it challenging to also make it beautiful. This is why web designers are excited about the possibility of having more fonts available for browsers. It opens up the design options that are currently pretty narrow.
-Kara
I've chosen the font settings in my browser for a reason. They are readable. I can easily tell the difference between a zero and a capital o; between a one and a lowercase l.
I don't need a web designer deciding their customer's "content" will look much better if they force me to read it in a cooler-looking font. Too often that means I'm forced resize the text until the text doesn't overlap the next line or flow out of boundaries under graphics, and then I'm left squinting at tiny tiny fonts.
If people in general would understand that it is not the medium or the technology that makes design good or bad, for print or web, we would take a large leap forward.
Design is about COMMUNICATION of ideas – all else are simply tools to achieve that. Typography can be one of the most subtle of these tools, but one of the most powerful, hence the desire of designers for more control in this area.
@ sabik & asuffield
So let me get this straight: if I use HTML and CSS to set the size, color, weight, emphasis and line spacing of text on my site then I am being a clever and resourceful web designer.
But if I express interest in expanding my typeface options beyond Times and Arial then I am just venting the frustrations of a Gutenberg-era dinosaurian control freak who needs to get with the fucking times, man.
"if I use HTML and CSS to set the size, color, weight, emphasis and line spacing of text on my site"
Please don't. The reader can set defaults for all that, and it's annoying when the writer seems to think they know better than me how I would like my text presented.
Design is about COMMUNICATION of ideas – all else are simply tools to achieve that. Typography can be one of the most subtle of these tools, but one of the most powerful, hence the desire of designers for more control in this area.
Typography is the mediation of communication by design, and by definition it actually impedes communication by adding extra creative information (subtle or no) to the plain text of the words. It is the height of conceit for graphic designers to lament a lack of control over the user's typeface selection. It is sheer power-play by those with an obstetric interest in something that is ultimately superfluous.
Case in point above: neither screen readers for the blind nor i18n care whether something is in Comic Sans.
This is a problem that i as an advertising student have come across many times...
I agree with the fact that it is not only content that makes a website interesting, things like typography as well as design are what attracts many viewers. Many typefaces have the ability to create expression through styles such as serif, sans serif etc.
Introducing new fonts to the web would be an exciting and innovative step forward for those who design ... personally, the web friendly fonts that designers have to choose from now are horrible.
This discussion thread brings two thoughts to mind:
First, (graphic, web, etc) designers want more control over online typography because type is the unique realm of designers. Understanding how text, and image+text, work together is what separates designers from illustrators, painters, photographers, writers, and others. It should be no surprise that they want more control of how type looks on the screen.
Second, as another anonymous mentioned before, design is about communication. More specifically it is about three kinds of communication. Rational Communication—is it legible, usable, understandable, clear. Emotional Communication—does it stir a specific emotional reaction in the user, and is that reaction productive to the communication. Visual Communication—is the work tied to a specific visual tradition, does is make a visual impact, or delight the eye of the viewer. Those who only want the content thank you very much, are ignoring the important role that the last two forms of communication play in design.
"Typography is the mediation of communication by design, and by definition it actually impedes communication by adding extra creative information ... to the plain text of the words"
EH, unless you have cracked telepathy, all communication is mediated. As communicators we must accept this, and move past a naive wish for "neutral" or "plain" communication—which is impossible—and use the affordances of whichever medium we have chosen to create the richest communication we can.
If we have chosen the written word, which is the symbolic representation of sounds that represent ideas, we must use all the affordances of the written word to communicate. Not just diction and structure, but glyphs and spacing too.
by definition it actually impedes communication by adding extra creative information
Wow, you must be a real bummer in an art gallery. Or a concert. Or a museum. Or the ballet. Etc.
The problem seems to be how to allow web-quality scalable fonts to be made available without allowing print-quality fonts to be downloaded (and thus cutting into sales revenue for typefaces for print, which will become increasingly a luxury product). I was thinking that the answer could be a resolution-constrained scalable format, consisting of a number of bitmap sizes, marked up with hints (saying "these pixels are a horizontal stroke", "there's a diagonal here", and such), so that a scaling engine can scale and/or inbetween them intelligently to make passable intermediate sizes. Since the scaling is done from bitmaps, the file is useless at higher resolutions than the maximum one included (or rather will produce an awkwardly imprecise machine-smoothed approximation of the original font, which may well become the next trend in grunge typography).
The problem seems to be how to allow web-quality scalable fonts to be made available without allowing print-quality fonts to be downloaded (and thus cutting into sales revenue for typefaces for print, which will become increasingly a luxury product).
NBC Sued in Font-Related Flare-Up
"It seems NBC didn't secure the rights to use a handful of Font Bureau's trademarked typefaces. The same ones, we should add, that have been used as part of NBC's fall marketing campaign to tout shows like The Jay Leno Show, Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon...In a trademark and copyright infringement lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Font Bureau argues that NBC only paid for a single license—which would only permit the company to install the typefaces on a single computer—and only paid to use a limited number of fonts."
I think the fear people have with this is tied to the 'low barrier to entry' on the web. This is one of the principle advantage of the Internet over print publishing, but the disadvantage is this means much more 'noise' competing with the signal. New fonts introduced to print publishing don't upset the order of things because the competitiveness and the size of the field already act to limit the influence of people with bad taste. On the web, that limiting effect is weaker. Any idiot can and will make a blog (or a myspace page -- myspace being a terrific argument against artistic self-expression). Any new technology is probably going to be exploited equally by the skilled and the unskilled. But it could hurt in the net. Imagine:
Internet worth = %good website * avg good website quality + %bad website * avg bad website quality
Pre-fonts:
Internet worth = 10%*0.9 + 90%*0.7
Post-fonts:
Internet worth = 10%*0.95 + 90%*0.5
Meh. I'll quite often do ctrl-a, ctrl-v into textpad when faced with Reading web pages with large amounts of text. Ariel or Verdana works just fine for me. Stay away from serif fonts and I'm happy - I hate Times New Roman more than ComicSans. The moron at Microsoft that makes Word default to it deserves an eternity in hell, IMHO.
Someone made mention of the "narrow" set of facilities currently at designers' disposal. Look at the variation in books. The near-absence of this variation is absolutely unmystifying. True, there are more than a few books you can point to and say they are very well typeset, but even the ones that fall into the shit category are usually better than most well-accepted websites.
It's also indispensably humorous that most of the self-serious persons who argue about these kinds of things do so out of a sense of holding the medium of their material in high regard, but proceed to implement designs more akin to that of tabloids than a respectable tome.
I hope this comment will someday be rendered in BLIPPO BOLD
The fundamental argument here is who owns presentation in the browser - the web content author, or the reader? Some of us are old fogies from the days before SGML spawned HTML, and believe that the screen belongs to us, and some are those meddling kids who showed up during the dot-com boom who think they can write any shiny advertising copy onto our screens and have it look just the way they want even though our screens might be anything from monospaced black&white to HDTV to text2speech voice readers. The Wintel revolution did force a lowest-common-denominator screen capacity for a while (though the dot-com kiddies still had trouble dealing with screens that had more or fewer pixels than they expected), and it's really only webphones that have forced them to remember that not all displays are alike. CSS is a sort of compromise that most of us purists can accept (especially because it recognizes that it's providing hints that the reader's browser might be set to ignore.)
But fundamentally the problem type designers are going to deal with is that we still want readers to control what they see, not just authors, and they've got the extra wrinkle that if they want fonts that aren't vanilla, they need to recognize that many people don't have the ones they want and will be grouchy about an extra few megabytes per page of font downloading if they want to push their favorite display preferences too hard.
Web design was treated as an extension of print design at the technical school where I studied it. The computer graphics and typography classes required work to be turned
in on paper.
I don't care about fonts unless they're silly looking or illegible. If embeddable fonts get designers away from using pictures of text instead of text, that might be a good thing, as long as I can configure my browser to not download those fonts if I don't want them.
"Meh. I'll quite often do ctrl-a, ctrl-v into textpad when faced with Reading web pages with large amounts of text. Ariel or Verdana works just fine for me. Stay away from serif fonts and I'm happy - I hate Times New Roman more than ComicSans. The moron at Microsoft that makes Word default to it deserves an eternity in hell, IMHO."
Isn't it selfish of that moron to default to something which research suggest (inconclusively) that most people can read more easily - a font with serifs? I suppose the alternative default would be the abomination which is Arial, which already makes fans of type die a little inside every time they see it.
Anyway... so much of this thread seems to be 'Screw these designers, I want to read the web the way I want to'. Er, you can. It's designed that way. It's what CSS is supposed to be about, separating content from formatting. Any sensible browser will allow you to override the font settings so that you don't have to play silly tricks like cutting and pasting the text to read it.
To me, it seems that giving designers fine control over fonts and layout is a good idea, if they can still provide the appropriate content, since you can then have 'pretty' sites (hey, I like a decent and appropriate choice of font), and it's so much easier to then pull out the content. The alternative is those 'flashblobs' from which it is so difficult to extract useful information.
So THIS is where the new BB design was obtained from...
Personally, I need a web site to be usable and functional rather than pretty. Most developers and designers seem to forget to ask themselves the simple question:
"Does it do what it is supposed to?"
... and spend far too long going:
"Yeah, I know it is not working yet (that comes in version 2) but look at the cool positioning of the logo..."
Those of you who don't like this: click Tools, Preferences and disable web fonts. Or specify everything to be in Arial, or whatever.
The rest of us will appreciate the improvements it makes to websites.
According to me the font of the browsers is either Times Roman or Arial is because these font types are very clear and understandable by and large i.e. I'd say they are the evergreen font types therefore no one gets too bored to use them.
Most developers and designers seem to forget to ask themselves the simple question: "Does it do what it is supposed to?"
Piffle. Most designers strive for readability and good navigation as their highest goals. It's clients who demand flash slideshows and twinkling unicorns.
So THIS is where the new BB design was obtained from.
And yet, people are complaining that the new design has large, readable type and ZOMG why are we catering to old people.
@blurgh Thank You for pointing out that if a website uses a CSS Style sheet to make it "pretty", then it can be overridden easily enough. This is of course dependent on whether or not the web designer is actually using a style sheet and not embedding fonts and styles, and whether or not the end user knows that a style sheet can be overridden and how. I think the people who believe they should be able to display websites the way they want, rather than the way the author wants their brand presented to the public, have failed to consider one important thing; a casual internet user probably doesn't know that they can override a website's default display via browser settings and they probably wouldn't care if they were informed. It's really only us computer nerds and those who need to change up the display due to physical requirements who care about this feature enough to figure out how to do it.
As a web designer I'd be over the moon if this conference generated some way of expanding my safe font list for creating accessible fast loading websites. Because Flash is just not an acceptable option for font delivery.
Most developers and designers seem to forget to ask themselves the simple question:
"Does it do what it is supposed to?"
And, funny enough, many, many readers forget to ask themselves the simple question "what might this text be doing?"
Perhaps every single thing that you're picking up on was fully intended by the designer? Wouldn't you feel silly, then, for complaining that a text is doing exactly what it was intended to do?
Speaking of impeded communication, in what sense is the word "obstetric" being used here?
EH, unless you have cracked telepathy, all communication is mediated. As communicators we must accept this, and move past a naive wish for "neutral" or "plain" communication—which is impossible—and use the affordances of whichever medium we have chosen to create the richest communication we can.
No, you are using a straw man here. Try to appreciate the gray areas: it's not a question of utopian communication or telepathy, it's the degree of mediation. Typography serves to increase the degree of mediation in a given textual communication. You even say this yourself: it's about "rich" communication, i.e. something added to basic communication. Pure woo.
I know I'm not espousing an opinion likely to be popular in these parts, and for what it's worth I am plenty of fun at galleries and other places where aesthetics are prioritized. Textual communication does not gain anything but designer-conceit from typography.
Beyond that, I don't hold much hope for CSS as a solution here, since it seems likely that user-CSS will break the text due to control-freakery (too-close tolerances) on the designer's part. In fact, a site that works well with any typeface signals a designer smart enough to discount all font choices toward a more flexible layout.
You even say this yourself: it's about "rich" communication, i.e. something added to basic communication. Pure woo.
I believe that Anon here is using the word rich to mean nuanced, as opposed to clumsy communication. You have the be careful with the way you use basic communication. I believe that I understand what you mean when you use the phrase (and please correct me if I'm wrong), but it's highly ambiguous, and as such, open to misinterpretation.
For example, when someone uses the default font option in Microsoft Word, they are telling us either that they don't care what font they use (or maybe that they don't know how to change it)--which, it seems to me, is what you mean by "basic" communication. But at the same time, this idea of basic communication is changing all the time. Word 2007, for example defaults to a sans-serif font (for the first time ever), which is easier to read on a computer screen than a serif font (which would be easier to read in print). Furthermore, it now has additional leading (1.15 spacing, rather than single spacing), which is easier to read for an aging population (ever wonder why some mass market paperbacks are a lot taller than others? It's the leading). And these are only some of the differences between the "basic" communication of Word 2007 and the earlier editions.
Can you see, then, how there is no such thing as "basic" communication? Yes, certain moments of composition (such as when working on a computer) may have default typographic behaviours, but by no means should we consider these behaviours to be basic, as they themselves are constructed for a number of reasons (seriously, the person(s) who made these changes for Word 2007 probably got paid a tonne to do it). As the post-structuralists would say, there is no neutral, and there is no outside.