OS X Code (r,s)

Posted on Monday 31 October 2005 - Popularity: unranked

Font and typography guru Erik Spiekermann, not only known for the Nokia screen font, talks about font design and how things have changed since the birth of digital typesetting. Cool pics of some of his early hand-drawn sketches of font designs and a lot of insider information. Especially interesting for web- and software-developers:

So what does a screenfont need in order to work then? Do you think there are any particular rules?

Well, like all letters, the important thing is that you don’t actually design the black, you design the white: the space inside it and the space around it. That is very important. If you apply that to screenfonts, you can make a really legible screenfont.

Sometimes the letters I design for bitmaps are a little ugly if you look at the individual letter, because you have to take away little pixels or add little pixels to make a character more distinct. Nobody looks at individual letters on a screen, as long as the words look good.

The main problem is that most people who make screenfonts are engineers, trying to imitate Helvetica or Arial, instead of designing to the fact that we read contrast, we read rhythm, blacks and whites, ins and outs, tops and bottoms…. They have a drawing of Arial beneath their work and just build up some pixels to make it look kind of similar. That’s rubbish, of course!

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