For trekking in the mountains, reach for solid, functional hiking boots that can handle rough terrain and inclement weather. To understand the need for separate text and display cuts for typefaces, I find it helpful to think of footwear. So if you’re going for a minimalist look and limit yourself to a single type family, optical sizes can help you reach an extra level of typographic sophistication. While judicious adjustments in spacing can make a text face shine in large sizes, display fonts tend to break up or clog when used for small(er) body copy. Type Network provides recommended size ranges for all fonts to help customers choose wisely. Text faces prioritize functionality and legibility in small sizes designs meant for big titles and headlines, on the other hand, favor elegance and impact. These are recommendations, not strict rules its sturdy and open design makes Embury Text work well in a wide range of sizes.Īlmost all typefaces are drawn with specific applications in mind. For example, the suggested use for Victoria Rushton’s Embury Text ranges from 15 to 48 pixels. Strictly speaking, we should call them “optical ranges” rather than “optical sizes”-digital fonts can be scaled, so they’re not tied to a single size anymore.
The letterforms in Miller Text are optimized for use in body copy at the larger end of the spectrum, from the refined Display and Headline sizes to the sparkling Miller Banner, the letterforms’ proportions morph and their contrast increases incrementally.
#GARAMOND TYPEFACE DESIGNER SERIES#
Matthew Carter’s Miller series has a wide optical range. A third way designers demarcate hierarchy is by using a single type family in different weights and sizes. Note that certain faces are less obvious about their family ties, like Kontour’s Odile and Elido (whose names are palindromes of each other), or Occupant Fonts’ Prensa and Amira (whose relationship is more conceptual). Others turn to coordinated type families whose names advertise their kinship-like Retype’s Laski Slab and Laski Sans, for example. Some designers prefer to structure the type by combining different typefaces. Designers achieve hierarchy partly through layout and partly through typography the appearance of the different bits of textual information hints at their function and relative importance. But the emergence of PostScript fonts with scalable outlines in the mid-1980s seemed to seal the fate of optical sizes for good.Ī clear hierarchy helps readers navigate page or screen. The early days of computer typesetting briefly brought back size-specific fonts, since characters had to be constructed on bitmap grids with fixed resolutions. Phototypesetting machines made it possible to scale characters on a negative filmstrip simply by magnifying or reducing their size through a lens. The need to produce individual sizes of typefaces declined further with the advent of photocomposition in the mid-twentieth century. While Benton’s machine sped up production by automating the scaling of letterforms, the different sizes had identical, non-optimized character shapes. They adapted the character shapes of a typeface design to be as legible and structurally sound as possible at each point size they cut-skillfully, painstakingly, and one letter at a time.Īround the turn of the twentieth century, Linn Boyd Benton’s invention of the pantographic engraving machine for type design marked the first inkling of the change to come. Punchcutters, the unsung heroes of their time, played a crucial role in the production of type. Once hardened, individual letters were composed into text for printing.
A matrix would then be set in a hand mold and filled with molten metal type alloy. These punches, typically cut in steel, were used to stamp glyphs into softer metal to form matrices. Joshua Darden’s sprawling Freight, from GarageFonts, comes in several optical sizes designed to preserve the typeface’s integrity across a wide range of applications.Īs Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing system gained traction in fifteenth-century Europe, once a typeface was designed, a punchcutter would physically cut its characters in hard metal to produce punches. Historically, though, when type was cast in metal, a different font had to be created for every size. That may sound odd to contemporary ears digital typefaces are, of course, scalable. These are some of the names used to describe optical sizes-different cuts of a typeface family that have been designed to work within a certain range. Micro, Text, Deck, Display, Headline, Banner, Big.
0 kommentar(er)
