[OpenFontLibrary] [GFD] Tom Phinney on Libre Fonts

[Kisan Mehta]

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On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 1:45 AM, vernon adams <vern at newtypography.co.uk>wrote:

> 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
>
>
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