The Trouble with Typography

This is a re-post from March last year, but I didn’t want to bury it in the Boicozine archive because, a year on, it’s still just as relevent especially after reading this… [aestheticrew.com]. So the typeface licensing debate goes on, only it looks like foundries will have to to go the way of record companies and film studios soon if they don’t pick up their game. Here’s how it ran last year… Today’s topic for discussion, ‘Typography is in trouble’, and not just any sort of trouble but serious trouble of the most heinous kind… and possibly something to do with extinction as well. This is due to three distinct factors which I shall endeavour to introduce here, one by one: The rise of the Photoshop Monkey, Internet Browsers and the Type Foundries themselves.

Photoshop is easy. That’s why people love it. It can do some crazy stuff for you but if are designing most of your work in Photoshop then you shouldn’t really be designing at all. Does that sound harsh? Have a look around at the visual noise you see everyday. Have a look at any effects laden website disaster [smashingmagazine.com]. Have a look at any recent Movie Poster [impawards.com]. Many of these Photoshop Monkeys will lazily pick through their existing font menu and use whatever is pre-installed on their computer rather than seeking out the most appropriate or well drawn typeface for the job. Either that or lazy marketing hacks (who love manipulating Photoshop Monkeys cause they can’t argue their case as well as fully fledged Graphoes) will specify a typeface simply because they have it on their PC and, therefore know what it’s called and what it looks like. In this case familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, just laziness.

The website you are looking at has the ability to display any typeface you’d like to specify. In fact, any website that employs Cascading Style Sheets [wikipedia] has been able to do this for ages now. Problem is your Browser can’t (well, IE4 could but this doesn’t really help much — Note: it’s back in Safari 3.1, see link above) [msdn.microsoft.com]. Could be developers just decided embedding fonts was unnecessary when you had a least five typefaces to choose from already. For the developer that finds typefaces a frivolous waste of resources you can already specify them as simply ’serif’, ’sans-serif’, ‘monospace’, ‘cursive’ and, ‘fantasy’ (!?). The other possible reason leads us to our third set of culprits in our ‘death of typography’ scenario…

Typefaces are expensive. Well, most good ones are. They can take a long, long, time to put together or require the sort of slight of hand only a handful of type experts can deliver. Typefaces need to be less expensive. Compare them to your average consumer product. Pretend you are shopping on your local high street or shopping mall or whatever and Woolworths now have a typeface aisle. Should I get Children of Men on DVD for £15 pounds or buy Berthold’s new OpenType version of Akzidenz Grotesk for £230 [bertholdtypes.com]? Sure, it’s a loose analogy but none of these type foundries seem to want to admit that many of the decisions regarding typefaces are being taken out of the hands of your traditional design professionals. People being free to create their own types of media (be it a blog, or a blurb book [blurb.com], or a myspace profile etc) means decisions on what typefaces to use are being made by more and more people. Typefaces are mass media. So why do they continue to be marketed to a select few. Surely, there’s some educating to be done on both sides of the fence here.

There are real solutions to this dilemma. Possibly, the best way to solve it is to separate typefaces into two distinct areas. The ‘bite-size’ chunkette [wired.com/snack_attack] and the Deluxe (or Professional) edition. For a typeface to be popular, all it really only needs is four fonts (this is what you should be calling a singular version of a typeface [typophile.com/wiki]), the Regular, the Italic, the Bold and the Bold Italic. That’s your basic package right there. Now all you have to do is market it like the delicious collectable eye-candy that it is and you’re away. The way the web is, this should get people chopping and changing fonts like crazy. The thing to remember is, that like candy, this is only the cheap substitute to the real meal (and you and I know that it’s okay to snack between meals but never substitute your dinner for candy). That’s where the Pro version comes in and the big cash money comes out. Whaddya think? It’s time to stop edging around the consumer and dive straight in. Now which foundry is going to be first to test the water?

Update: And so it begins: [fonts.info]

Further Reading on the Trouble with Typography:
The unfortunate death of Helvetica
[designbyfire.com/31]
Web Design is 95% Typography (Part 1)
[informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period]
Web Design is 95% Typography (Part 2)
[informationarchitects.jp/webdesign-is-95-typography-partii]