[OpenFontLibrary] [GFD] Tom Phinney on Libre Fonts

[Raphaël Bastide]

I agree with Vernon, I personally use a lot what you call “Junk” fonts and
I am not the only one. As you can imagine an important scene of
contemporary graphic design is referring to punk / DIY culture. I am not
talking about amateur characters designers or graphic designers but about
real authors, studios an recognized designers working most of the time in
for cultural institutions and sometimes teaching in prestigious design
schools. Here is a non-exhaustive list of one of them:

http://www.hort.org.uk/
http://www.werkplaatstypografie.org/
http://osp.constantvzw.org/
http://radimpesko.com/
http://www.officeabc.cc/
http://large.la/work/
…


-- 
Raphaël Bastide
raphaelbastide.com


On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 4:48 PM, Vernon Adams <vern at newtypography.co.uk>wrote:

> 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."
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/openfontlibrary/attachments/20131013/6c2ea359/attachment.html>