What is in a font?
Fonts are just those little pictures that appear on the screen to aid the computer show you what it has in graphical form. So that is a font. Maybe a little more, a lot of fonts exist, right from the plain and straight to curves and blobs. I started noticing serifed and sans fonts, but that was as far as my classification would go.The people who made fonts where people who would draw a few glyphs as they please and index them by their character ids.
I got a whole new perspective when i had a chat with one my friends Anand doing a course in design. I never knew that making a font involved lot of careful design. Fonts or rather typefaces differ on the intended use in the text as well asthe mode of display.
Calligraphy was an art that i would relate to days of copywriting by hand, a good hand always got the first look indeed. The carry over of this aestheic sense though the varieties of printing press from Gutenberg to photo-offsets and computer monitors.
Serifs look great on printed text, with lots of matter. The serif has evolved from printing, when it required ink to seep into corners. The serif may also have prevented uncut edges from appearing by trapping dust. The origins have been claimed to be difficulties in making right angles with a chisel, leaving a notch. The serif is easier for the eye, providing a line of flow of text. The modern innovations being the larger and larger contrasts between thin and thicker lines.
Sans found to be traditionally not pleasing to the eye, has its way on the web, where the low resolution of computer monitors makes it easier to display them. More commonly used on shorter text like headlines in print, they are known for cleanliness! Sans also comes in many forms - humanist is most aestheic while mathematicians would love the simplicity of geometric shapes.
There is much more to reading a book and for that matter this page than a lonely author writing away. The font is the face of writing that conveys that affects reading in subtle ways.
Fonts are indeed the petals of the beautiful flower of calligraphy. Any tribute to typhgraphers who brought this page to you as countless others, would always fall short.
Fonts are just those little pictures that appear on the screen to aid the computer show you what it has in graphical form. So that is a font. Maybe a little more, a lot of fonts exist, right from the plain and straight to curves and blobs. I started noticing serifed and sans fonts, but that was as far as my classification would go.The people who made fonts where people who would draw a few glyphs as they please and index them by their character ids.
I got a whole new perspective when i had a chat with one my friends Anand doing a course in design. I never knew that making a font involved lot of careful design. Fonts or rather typefaces differ on the intended use in the text as well asthe mode of display.
Calligraphy was an art that i would relate to days of copywriting by hand, a good hand always got the first look indeed. The carry over of this aestheic sense though the varieties of printing press from Gutenberg to photo-offsets and computer monitors.
Serifs look great on printed text, with lots of matter. The serif has evolved from printing, when it required ink to seep into corners. The serif may also have prevented uncut edges from appearing by trapping dust. The origins have been claimed to be difficulties in making right angles with a chisel, leaving a notch. The serif is easier for the eye, providing a line of flow of text. The modern innovations being the larger and larger contrasts between thin and thicker lines.
Sans found to be traditionally not pleasing to the eye, has its way on the web, where the low resolution of computer monitors makes it easier to display them. More commonly used on shorter text like headlines in print, they are known for cleanliness! Sans also comes in many forms - humanist is most aestheic while mathematicians would love the simplicity of geometric shapes.
There is much more to reading a book and for that matter this page than a lonely author writing away. The font is the face of writing that conveys that affects reading in subtle ways.
Fonts are indeed the petals of the beautiful flower of calligraphy. Any tribute to typhgraphers who brought this page to you as countless others, would always fall short.
posted by adarshnat at
8:57 AM
|
0 comments
