[OpenFontLibrary] [GFD] Tom Phinney on Libre Fonts

[vernon adams]

Interesting thoughts (as usual) Eric. Thanks.

I think you are right about 'quality as paramount' being a just a 'strategy'. It explains why some designers may consider themselves (and present themeselves) as a purveyor of quality, and yet not necessarily provide such paramount levels of quality in their own products.  And anyway, i'm not sure that the technical quality we are discussing here is really as big a selling point as people think. We live in far more interesting times than that. 

If you are only really offering technical quality, then you are maybe pitching your products on the wrong side of todays curve. Just like, it's not possible to sell music just on the fact that the artist is a virtuoso, or that the music was recoded at highest definition. Virtuosity and high definition alone, cannot compete against amateurs and / or lo-fi that contains more slippery qualities such as soul, excitement, rhythm, emotion, freedom... and the list goes on…  In the days before the Music Industry evaporated, the idea that you did not need technical expertise at any stage in the music business to succesfully distribute music to users and listeners, would have been viewed as idiotic. Technology has now made that idiotic idea a very normal way for people to make, distribute, use and listen to music. On top of that, despite the askew claims of a few like David Byrne, the creativity, choice and variety, of music available to everyone now is enormous, compared to the days when the Music Industry was the big gatekeeper of what we could listen to. The same has started happening with type design, just as it has done / will do with many other commercial sectors.

What i would say to also bear in mind is that as more and more 'non-experts' and 'amateurs' join the ranks of the design world, then even the designer-as-the-target-client changes for the type industry. The user swarm is very quickly filling the design industries too. I think i see evidence that the creative and design comminities are generally moving more away from finding meaning in the 'quality as paramount' strategy, and more towards finding paramount meaning in any stuff that really keeps them the right side of the creative curve. And it's not due to a lowering of standards or non-education, it's the opposite; people are maybe becoming more sophisticated, fine-tuned, and discriminating in their tastes as they become exposed to more and more alternative narratives of what is 'good' and what is 'bad'.

-vernon



On 18 Oct 2013, at 01:57, Eric Schrijver <eric at authoritism.net> wrote:

> I went to the ATypI, and it was an interesting experience. What I found remarkable, is the pervasive idea that graphic designers know nothing about type. A well known Dutch designer explained me: ‘nowadays, there is only one way designers can really intervene in a font, and that is by changing the spacing (tracking, leading). And when I look at contemporary magazines, I see they manage to mess that up! Imagine what will happen if one allows them more possibilities.’
> 
> Type design is a funny business. The ATypI style type design thinking, is to conceive of the type designer as an artist, who creates a finished work. Except, they have the misfortune, that compared to other artistic fields, this work can only exist if it is re-used. And it will be re-used by people who are deemed to be incompetent—the artist is misunderstood!
> 
> It is kind of like going to a conference of stock photographers. They all claim magazine editors know nothing about photography. They keep cropping!
> 
> As a graphic designer, as Raphaël rightly points out, this is of course a frustrating argument. The typographic community claims designers do not know ‘quality’, whereas we might simply not always be interested in their sense of quality. There are design jobs in which you need a clean, evenly spaced, well balanced typeface, and their might be a job for which you need something more rough, immediate and unpolished.
> 
> And because both kinds of design aesthetic continue to exist in modern design, traditional type design skills will stay valuable. Except, like Vernon says, type designers need to understand that a top down model where they push a selected, curated set of typefaces on the world does not exist (and has never existed, not since the internet at least), and that they can not really get away with being so elitist as to postulate that no-one understands type.
> 
> Cheers,
> Eric
> 
> PS The concept of ‘quality’ as paramount, is of course, a strategy— Ricardo Lafuente is onto something when he borrows Fred Smeijers’ terminology, to describe type designers efforts to separate type designers into “true” type designers and mere font tweakers [1]. I wrote some more about the economic reasoning traditionalist conception of type on my blog [2].
> 
> [1] http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/blog/typo/appropriation-and-type-before-and-today
> [2] http://i.liketightpants.net/and/no-one-starts-from-scratch-type-design-and-the-logic-of-the-fork