Category Archives: Typography

My Column on Columns

For as long as I can remember, designers working in digital media have wanted the ability to lay out text in columns — first on the Web, now within multitouch apps. I’ve flirted with it myself, back when when it was relatively difficult to pull off, but in recent years CSS3 has made it possible, if not probable, that columnar layouts can be delivered to wide swaths of Web users. On multitouch devices, iOS developers routinely columnize text using Core Text and other methods, and their successes with these techniques have led columnized text to be common on that platform, creating perhaps the most ‘print-like’ digital layouts we’ve seen yet.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that, along with other recent improvements in digital typography, columnized text augurs the future of digital layout design. That is, some might argue that screen-based content will over time look more and more like magazine-style pages, where text is flowed from one parallel column to another, rather than the more common Web convention in which a block of text exists in a single column, reading top to bottom within a screen that scrolls.

I take a different position, though. I think that the desire to approach screen-based layout with columnized text is misguided. Multiple columns are an effective layout technique in print because they improve legibility for long blocks of text. But for digital media, it’s my feeling that they make it harder to read text.

Continue Reading …

+

What I Said About Apple and Typography

I watched with dismay yesterday when the comment thread for my post, “Better Display, Same Typography,” a rant about Apple’s lackluster efforts in typography on all of its platforms, went a bit astray. Lots of commenters understood what I was trying to say, but many others didn’t.

Many thought I was criticizing the forthcoming iBooks for iPhone, which is understandable because the photo included in the post was of exactly that — iBooks for iPhone displaying a less-than-sterling example of typographic chops. But I wasn’t singling out iBooks, or the iOS even, so it’s my fault for not being sufficiently explicit.

What I meant was that, on all of its platforms, Apple has far from exceeded expectations it has itself set for typography. Just take one look at the Fonts panel that appears in any Cocoa app (e.g., TextEdit) to see what I mean. It hasn’t changed in nearly a decade, and it’s still far more difficult to use than it should be. (I also urge everyone to read Stephen Coles’ blog post, which I linked to, for more details on Apple’s infractions on the iPad.)

Maybe most disappointing of all, though, were the comments that asserted that no one cares about this stuff except for typographic prima donnas like myself, that it matters not one whit to the world at large. I readily admit that most people will never care whether Apple changes its ways here or not — it goes without saying that Apple more than satisfies the general public’s appetite for stellar design already — but that doesn’t mean that they should be let off the hook.

Fine typography is important; it’s a tradition that goes back for centuries, that has helped us elevate our communication and that informs our sense of self and civilization. Now, it’s true that in the midst of the digital revolution we’re living through, we may have to leave many such traditions behind, but fine typography doesn’t have to be one of them. There’s no technological or business reason why we can’t make the tools for rich typography more readily available.

In fact, we have much of what we need in place already, largely thanks to Apple: an ocean of beautifully rendered and thoughtfully constructed fonts, a desktop operating system with an audience that’s highly receptive to the craft, a mobile platform that unites visual design with hardware design, and increasingly capable displays for rendering great type. All we lack is the dedicated passion of people who are in a position to bring it all together, to carry it that last mile — or to fulfill the promise that such laudable work has established. That’s why I believe Apple should do a better job.

Continue Reading …

+

Better Screen, Same Typography

Three years ago I waited in line to buy the original iPhone and I haven’t upgraded since, so I’m definitely warming up my credit card for Apple’s newly announced iPhone 4. I admit that it took some will power to sit out the subsequent releases of the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS; the not-insignificant speed gains that those models brought would’ve come in really handy. Still, neither of those updates struck me as particularly impressive. They were incremental, at best, where iPhone 4 seems like a major leap forward.

Even the new phone’s screen, the so-called Retina Display, is an important development on its own. Its incredibly high concentration of pixels (326 ppi, or four times the density of previous iPhones) promises a quality of resolution that’s positively print-like, where the pixels seem to disappear to the eye and rendering of curved shapes is much smoother. The advent of higher and higher density screens like this one will continue to have some subtle but important changes on the way we practice design for digital media, eventually pushing us to work in a resolution-independent framework that’s currently foreign to most.

Continue Reading …

+