[OpenFontLibrary] [GFD] Tom Phinney on Libre Fonts

[Eric Schrijver]

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

On 13-10-13 20:07, Raphaël Bastide wrote:
> 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 <http://raphaelbastide.com>
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 4:48 PM, Vernon Adams <vern at newtypography.co.uk
> <mailto: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
>     <mailto: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."
>
>