[OpenFontLibrary] [GFD] Tom Phinney on Libre Fonts

[Vernon Adams]

This is actually the line i find most nonsensical ;)  Where is the harm in "junk fonts"? I just dont see it. Why even waste energy in jumping up and down about it? Unless you have a presentation to write to soothe the retired gatekeepers convention, i guess ;)  People find a use for junk fonts, people dont find a use for them. People find a use for super-standard fonts, people dont find a use for them. It's the same thing. Type is no longer a rarified, elistist product, that only stays consumed within rarified, elite sections of societies. Fonts are now as common as muck. I can see that some people's tastes are offended by this reality, but rarified 'tastes' will allways be offended, in fact the ability to have one's 'tastes' offended seems to be 'zeitgeist No. 1' in this post-post-modern age, everyone's now a taste-monger and quality-tester to the point where 'taste' and 'quality' have never had less concrete meaning, and 'good taste' and 'quality' are now firmly residing at street level, not at ivory tower level. Besides, it's all about Stats now. And also, irony, Thomas, your idea of 'good taste' may not even be on any 'taste' scale for the unwashed, twerking, instagrammified masses. The danger is, that you may now be the one lagging behind in taste and sense of quality :-)
To me, your argument make no sense; doesn't Google (and the net as a whole) put these decisions (of taste and quality) in the hands of the experts par-excellance, aka 'the user'. If a font gets used 'en mass' then it has clearly passed the taste & quality & etc test. Are you suggesting that this very effective system would be better replaced by using a small group of 'experts' to deal with deciding what all users want? Quaint idea. Who would you pick to be in your gatekeeper group? And also, surely dont the webfont services provided by the big Font Foundries use your gatekeeper model? Why then have the google font servers managed under the same system? Isn't it better to have a breadth of diversity? Whats the big deal in 'unifying' font design in this day and age? 

-vernon



On 13 Oct 2013, at 03:09, Pablo Impallari <impallari at gmail.com> wrote:

> "One of my perennial arguments with the folks at Google is about the fact that they didn’t have a very high quality bar at all, and let in an awful lot of fonts that I would say are simply crap or at least substandard, at an objective level. Some of the folks on the Google side of the fence say that they are simply giving their users free choice and that if one of the fonts I consider to be junk becomes popular, then that’s evidence that it was actually “good.” I don’t have much patience for this line of argument. I think that Google is abandoning what it ought to see as a responsibility to be a gatekeeper not of taste, but of quality, given that it is not hard to find the expertise to deal with these things."