1 00:00:00,709 --> 00:00:02,235 Type is something we consume 2 00:00:02,235 --> 00:00:04,157 in enormous quantities. 3 00:00:04,157 --> 00:00:05,239 In much of the world, 4 00:00:05,239 --> 00:00:07,107 it's completely inescapable. 5 00:00:07,107 --> 00:00:10,130 But few consumers are concerned to know 6 00:00:10,130 --> 00:00:12,462 where a particular typeface came from 7 00:00:12,462 --> 00:00:15,226 or when or who designed it, 8 00:00:15,226 --> 00:00:18,579 if, indeed, there was any human agency involved 9 00:00:18,579 --> 00:00:21,376 in its creation, if it didn't just sort of materialize 10 00:00:21,376 --> 00:00:25,088 out of the software ether. 11 00:00:25,088 --> 00:00:28,613 But I do have to be concerned with those things. 12 00:00:28,613 --> 00:00:30,130 It's my job. 13 00:00:30,130 --> 00:00:32,340 I'm one of the tiny handful of people 14 00:00:32,340 --> 00:00:34,454 who gets badly bent out of shape 15 00:00:34,454 --> 00:00:37,048 by the bad spacing of the T and the E 16 00:00:37,048 --> 00:00:38,948 that you see there. 17 00:00:38,948 --> 00:00:40,390 I've got to take that slide off. 18 00:00:40,390 --> 00:00:42,461 I can't stand it. Nor can Chris. 19 00:00:42,461 --> 00:00:44,122 There. Good. 20 00:00:44,122 --> 00:00:45,890 So my talk is about the connection 21 00:00:45,890 --> 00:00:49,290 between technology and design of type. 22 00:00:49,290 --> 00:00:51,953 The technology has changed 23 00:00:51,953 --> 00:00:54,825 a number of times since I started work: 24 00:00:54,825 --> 00:00:59,486 photo, digital, desktop, screen, web. 25 00:00:59,486 --> 00:01:01,224 I've had to survive those changes and try 26 00:01:01,224 --> 00:01:03,928 to understand their implications for what I do 27 00:01:03,928 --> 00:01:05,319 for design. 28 00:01:05,319 --> 00:01:10,489 This slide is about the effect of tools on form. 29 00:01:10,489 --> 00:01:13,390 The two letters, the two K's, 30 00:01:13,390 --> 00:01:16,715 the one on your left, my right, is modern, 31 00:01:16,715 --> 00:01:18,126 made on a computer. 32 00:01:18,126 --> 00:01:20,168 All straight lines are dead straight. 33 00:01:20,168 --> 00:01:22,978 The curves have that kind of mathematical smoothness 34 00:01:22,978 --> 00:01:26,724 that the Bézier formula imposes. 35 00:01:26,724 --> 00:01:29,221 On the right, ancient Gothic, 36 00:01:29,221 --> 00:01:33,280 cut in the resistant material of steel by hand. 37 00:01:33,280 --> 00:01:35,405 None of the straight lines are actually straight. 38 00:01:35,405 --> 00:01:37,570 The curves are kind of subtle. 39 00:01:37,570 --> 00:01:42,284 It has that spark of life from the human hand 40 00:01:42,284 --> 00:01:44,198 that the machine or the program 41 00:01:44,198 --> 00:01:46,131 can never capture. 42 00:01:46,131 --> 00:01:48,110 What a contrast. 43 00:01:48,110 --> 00:01:50,689 Well, I tell a lie. 44 00:01:50,689 --> 00:01:53,677 A lie at TED. I'm really sorry. 45 00:01:53,677 --> 00:01:55,798 Both of these were made on a computer, 46 00:01:55,798 --> 00:01:57,724 same software, same Bézier curves, 47 00:01:57,724 --> 00:01:59,416 same font format. 48 00:01:59,416 --> 00:02:01,950 The one on your left 49 00:02:01,950 --> 00:02:04,204 was made by Zuzana Licko at Emigre, 50 00:02:04,204 --> 00:02:05,639 and I did the other one. 51 00:02:05,639 --> 00:02:08,995 The tool is the same, yet the letters are different. 52 00:02:08,995 --> 00:02:10,518 The letters are different 53 00:02:10,518 --> 00:02:11,724 because the designers are different. 54 00:02:11,724 --> 00:02:14,985 That's all. Zuzana wanted hers to look like that. 55 00:02:14,985 --> 00:02:18,106 I wanted mine to look like that. End of story. 56 00:02:18,106 --> 00:02:20,310 Type is very adaptable. 57 00:02:20,310 --> 00:02:23,631 Unlike a fine art, such as sculpture or architecture, 58 00:02:23,631 --> 00:02:27,030 type hides its methods. 59 00:02:27,030 --> 00:02:29,827 I think of myself as an industrial designer. 60 00:02:29,827 --> 00:02:31,393 The thing I design is manufactured, 61 00:02:31,393 --> 00:02:33,269 and it has a function: 62 00:02:33,269 --> 00:02:35,107 to be read, to convey meaning. 63 00:02:35,107 --> 00:02:36,753 But there is a bit more to it than that. 64 00:02:36,753 --> 00:02:38,601 There's the sort of aesthetic element. 65 00:02:38,601 --> 00:02:41,317 What makes these two letters different 66 00:02:41,317 --> 00:02:44,349 from different interpretations by different designers? 67 00:02:44,349 --> 00:02:46,362 What gives the work of some designers 68 00:02:46,362 --> 00:02:49,273 sort of characteristic personal style, 69 00:02:49,273 --> 00:02:51,810 as you might find in the work of a fashion designer, 70 00:02:51,810 --> 00:02:54,885 an automobile designer, whatever? 71 00:02:54,885 --> 00:02:56,660 There have been some cases, I admit, 72 00:02:56,660 --> 00:02:57,810 where I as a designer 73 00:02:57,810 --> 00:03:00,899 did feel the influence of technology. 74 00:03:00,899 --> 00:03:03,959 This is from the mid-'60s, 75 00:03:03,959 --> 00:03:06,194 the change from metal type to photo, 76 00:03:06,194 --> 00:03:07,896 hot to cold. 77 00:03:07,896 --> 00:03:09,093 This brought some benefits 78 00:03:09,093 --> 00:03:12,439 but also one particular drawback: 79 00:03:12,439 --> 00:03:15,112 a spacing system that only provided 80 00:03:15,112 --> 00:03:19,095 18 discrete units for letters 81 00:03:19,095 --> 00:03:21,558 to be accommodated on. 82 00:03:21,558 --> 00:03:23,534 I was asked at this time to design 83 00:03:23,534 --> 00:03:26,272 a series of condensed sans serif types 84 00:03:26,272 --> 00:03:29,435 with as many different variants as possible 85 00:03:29,435 --> 00:03:33,282 within this 18-unit box. 86 00:03:33,282 --> 00:03:34,921 Quickly looking at the arithmetic, 87 00:03:34,921 --> 00:03:38,230 I realized I could only actually make three 88 00:03:38,230 --> 00:03:41,617 of related design. Here you see them. 89 00:03:41,617 --> 00:03:44,208 In Helvetica Compressed, Extra Compressed, 90 00:03:44,208 --> 00:03:48,019 and Ultra Compressed, this rigid 18-unit system 91 00:03:48,019 --> 00:03:49,592 really boxed me in. 92 00:03:49,592 --> 00:03:51,425 It kind of determined the proportions 93 00:03:51,425 --> 00:03:53,714 of the design. 94 00:03:53,714 --> 00:03:57,744 Here are the typefaces, at least the lower cases. 95 00:03:57,744 --> 00:04:00,436 So do you look at these and say, 96 00:04:00,436 --> 00:04:03,575 "Poor Matthew, he had to submit to a problem, 97 00:04:03,575 --> 00:04:07,382 and by God it shows in the results." 98 00:04:07,382 --> 00:04:08,689 I hope not. 99 00:04:08,689 --> 00:04:10,930 If I were doing this same job today, 100 00:04:10,930 --> 00:04:13,756 instead of having 18 spacing units, 101 00:04:13,756 --> 00:04:16,840 I would have 1,000. 102 00:04:16,840 --> 00:04:19,293 Clearly I could make more variants, 103 00:04:19,293 --> 00:04:23,989 but would these three members of the family be better? 104 00:04:23,989 --> 00:04:25,841 It's hard to say without actually doing it, 105 00:04:25,841 --> 00:04:27,548 but they would not be better in the proportion 106 00:04:27,548 --> 00:04:30,637 of 1,000 to 18, I can tell you that. 107 00:04:30,637 --> 00:04:32,575 My instinct tells you that any improvement 108 00:04:32,575 --> 00:04:35,653 would be rather slight, because they were designed 109 00:04:35,653 --> 00:04:38,574 as functions of the system they were designed to fit, 110 00:04:38,574 --> 00:04:40,983 and as I said, type is very adaptable. 111 00:04:40,983 --> 00:04:43,770 It does hide its methods. 112 00:04:43,770 --> 00:04:46,452 All industrial designers work within constraints. 113 00:04:46,452 --> 00:04:48,944 This is not fine art. 114 00:04:48,944 --> 00:04:50,822 The question is, does a constraint 115 00:04:50,822 --> 00:04:53,489 force a compromise? 116 00:04:53,489 --> 00:04:55,000 By accepting a constraint, 117 00:04:55,000 --> 00:04:57,449 are you working to a lower standard? 118 00:04:57,449 --> 00:04:59,411 I don't believe so, and I've always been encouraged 119 00:04:59,411 --> 00:05:01,535 by something that Charles Eames said. 120 00:05:01,535 --> 00:05:03,080 He said he was conscious of working 121 00:05:03,080 --> 00:05:04,118 within constraints, 122 00:05:04,118 --> 00:05:07,344 but not of making compromises. 123 00:05:07,344 --> 00:05:09,905 The distinction between a constraint 124 00:05:09,905 --> 00:05:12,280 and a compromise is obviously very subtle, 125 00:05:12,280 --> 00:05:17,951 but it's very central to my attitude to work. 126 00:05:17,951 --> 00:05:20,842 Remember this reading experience? 127 00:05:20,842 --> 00:05:22,267 The phone book. I'll hold the slide 128 00:05:22,267 --> 00:05:26,802 so you can enjoy the nostalgia. 129 00:05:26,802 --> 00:05:29,548 This is from the mid-'70s early trials 130 00:05:29,548 --> 00:05:32,177 of Bell Centennial typeface I designed 131 00:05:32,177 --> 00:05:33,951 for the U.S. phone books, 132 00:05:33,951 --> 00:05:37,270 and it was my first experience of digital type, 133 00:05:37,270 --> 00:05:41,440 and quite a baptism. 134 00:05:41,440 --> 00:05:43,039 Designed for the phone books, as I said, 135 00:05:43,039 --> 00:05:46,407 to be printed at tiny size on newsprint 136 00:05:46,407 --> 00:05:48,725 on very high-speed rotary presses 137 00:05:48,725 --> 00:05:51,477 with ink that was kerosene and lampblack. 138 00:05:51,477 --> 00:05:55,318 This is not a hospitable environment 139 00:05:55,318 --> 00:05:58,520 for a typographic designer. 140 00:05:58,520 --> 00:06:00,419 So the challenge for me was to design type 141 00:06:00,419 --> 00:06:01,920 that performed as well as possible 142 00:06:01,920 --> 00:06:06,665 in these very adverse production conditions. 143 00:06:06,665 --> 00:06:09,520 As I say, we were in the infancy of digital type. 144 00:06:09,520 --> 00:06:12,339 I had to draw every character by hand 145 00:06:12,339 --> 00:06:14,054 on quadrille graph paper -- 146 00:06:14,054 --> 00:06:16,006 there were four weights of Bell Centennial — 147 00:06:16,006 --> 00:06:19,359 pixel by pixel, then encode them raster line by raster line 148 00:06:19,359 --> 00:06:20,340 for the keyboard. 149 00:06:20,340 --> 00:06:24,764 It took two years, but I learned a lot. 150 00:06:24,764 --> 00:06:26,394 These letters look as though they've been chewed 151 00:06:26,394 --> 00:06:27,838 by the dog or something or other, 152 00:06:27,838 --> 00:06:29,780 but the missing pixels at the intersections 153 00:06:29,780 --> 00:06:31,385 of strokes or in the crotches 154 00:06:31,385 --> 00:06:34,559 are the result of my studying the effects 155 00:06:34,559 --> 00:06:37,505 of ink spread on cheap paper 156 00:06:37,505 --> 00:06:41,242 and reacting, revising the font accordingly. 157 00:06:41,242 --> 00:06:44,492 These strange artifacts are designed to compensate 158 00:06:44,492 --> 00:06:47,244 for the undesirable effects of scale 159 00:06:47,244 --> 00:06:49,530 and production process. 160 00:06:49,530 --> 00:06:52,376 At the outset, AT&T had wanted 161 00:06:52,376 --> 00:06:55,617 to set the phone books in Helvetica, 162 00:06:55,617 --> 00:06:57,282 but as my friend Erik Spiekermann said 163 00:06:57,282 --> 00:06:59,785 in the Helvetica movie, if you've seen that, 164 00:06:59,785 --> 00:07:01,820 the letters in Helvetica were designed to be 165 00:07:01,820 --> 00:07:04,561 as similar to one another as possible. 166 00:07:04,561 --> 00:07:07,835 This is not the recipe for legibility at small size. 167 00:07:07,835 --> 00:07:10,425 It looks very elegant up on a slide. 168 00:07:10,425 --> 00:07:12,615 I had to disambiguate these forms 169 00:07:12,615 --> 00:07:15,615 of the figures as much as possible in Bell Centennial 170 00:07:15,615 --> 00:07:17,910 by sort of opening the shapes up, as you can see 171 00:07:17,910 --> 00:07:20,823 in the bottom part of that slide. 172 00:07:20,823 --> 00:07:23,480 So now we're on to the mid-'80s, 173 00:07:23,480 --> 00:07:26,036 the early days of digital outline fonts, 174 00:07:26,036 --> 00:07:28,393 vector technology. 175 00:07:28,393 --> 00:07:30,431 There was an issue at that time 176 00:07:30,431 --> 00:07:32,287 with the size of the fonts, 177 00:07:32,287 --> 00:07:35,171 the amount of data that was required to find 178 00:07:35,171 --> 00:07:40,141 and store a font in computer memory. 179 00:07:40,141 --> 00:07:41,799 It limited the number of fonts you could get 180 00:07:41,799 --> 00:07:44,789 on your typesetting system at any one time. 181 00:07:44,789 --> 00:07:48,938 I did an analysis of the data, 182 00:07:48,938 --> 00:07:51,462 and found that a typical serif face 183 00:07:51,462 --> 00:07:52,921 you see on the left 184 00:07:52,921 --> 00:07:54,937 needed nearly twice as much data 185 00:07:54,937 --> 00:07:57,473 as a sans serif in the middle 186 00:07:57,473 --> 00:07:59,535 because of all the points required 187 00:07:59,535 --> 00:08:04,043 to define the elegantly curved serif brackets. 188 00:08:04,043 --> 00:08:07,477 The numbers at the bottom of the slide, by the way, 189 00:08:07,477 --> 00:08:09,179 they represent the amount of data 190 00:08:09,179 --> 00:08:12,984 needed to store each of the fonts. 191 00:08:12,984 --> 00:08:15,150 So the sans serif, in the middle, 192 00:08:15,150 --> 00:08:18,114 sans the serifs, was much more economical, 193 00:08:18,114 --> 00:08:20,313 81 to 151. 194 00:08:20,313 --> 00:08:23,970 "Aha," I thought. "The engineers have a problem. 195 00:08:23,970 --> 00:08:26,205 Designer to the rescue." 196 00:08:26,205 --> 00:08:28,552 I made a serif type, you can see it on the right, 197 00:08:28,552 --> 00:08:30,499 without curved serifs. 198 00:08:30,499 --> 00:08:32,915 I made them polygonal, out of straight line segments, 199 00:08:32,915 --> 00:08:34,898 chamfered brackets. 200 00:08:34,898 --> 00:08:39,266 And look, as economical in data as a sans serif. 201 00:08:39,266 --> 00:08:41,565 We call it Charter, on the right. 202 00:08:41,565 --> 00:08:43,535 So I went to the head of engineering 203 00:08:43,535 --> 00:08:45,993 with my numbers, and I said proudly, 204 00:08:45,993 --> 00:08:48,121 "I have solved your problem." 205 00:08:48,121 --> 00:08:51,834 "Oh," he said. "What problem?" 206 00:08:51,834 --> 00:08:53,480 And I said, "Well, you know, the problem 207 00:08:53,480 --> 00:08:56,897 of the huge data you require for serif fonts and so on." 208 00:08:56,897 --> 00:09:00,444 "Oh," he said. "We solved that problem last week. 209 00:09:00,444 --> 00:09:02,600 We wrote a compaction routine that reduces 210 00:09:02,600 --> 00:09:05,180 the size of all fonts by an order of magnitude. 211 00:09:05,180 --> 00:09:07,168 You can have as many fonts on your system 212 00:09:07,168 --> 00:09:08,726 as you like." 213 00:09:08,726 --> 00:09:11,340 "Well, thank you for letting me know," I said. 214 00:09:11,340 --> 00:09:12,970 Foiled again. 215 00:09:12,970 --> 00:09:15,015 I was left with a design solution 216 00:09:15,015 --> 00:09:19,488 for a nonexistent technical problem. 217 00:09:19,488 --> 00:09:21,957 But here is where the story sort of gets interesting for me. 218 00:09:21,957 --> 00:09:24,552 I didn't just throw my design away 219 00:09:24,552 --> 00:09:25,953 in a fit of pique. 220 00:09:25,953 --> 00:09:27,690 I persevered. 221 00:09:27,690 --> 00:09:29,858 What had started as a technical exercise 222 00:09:29,858 --> 00:09:33,122 became an aesthetic exercise, really. 223 00:09:33,122 --> 00:09:36,171 In other words, I had come to like this typeface. 224 00:09:36,171 --> 00:09:38,490 Forget its origins. Screw that. 225 00:09:38,490 --> 00:09:40,980 I liked the design for its own sake. 226 00:09:40,980 --> 00:09:43,363 The simplified forms of Charter 227 00:09:43,363 --> 00:09:45,446 gave it a sort of plain-spoken quality 228 00:09:45,446 --> 00:09:46,997 and unfussy spareness 229 00:09:46,997 --> 00:09:49,487 that sort of pleased me. 230 00:09:49,487 --> 00:09:52,040 You know, at times of technical innovation, 231 00:09:52,040 --> 00:09:53,560 designers want to be influenced 232 00:09:53,560 --> 00:09:55,296 by what's in the air. 233 00:09:55,296 --> 00:09:57,527 We want to respond. We want to be pushed 234 00:09:57,527 --> 00:10:00,938 into exploring something new. 235 00:10:00,938 --> 00:10:03,837 So Charter is a sort of parable for me, really. 236 00:10:03,837 --> 00:10:07,627 In the end, there was no hard and fast causal link 237 00:10:07,627 --> 00:10:10,820 between the technology and the design of Charter. 238 00:10:10,820 --> 00:10:14,582 I had really misunderstood the technology. 239 00:10:14,582 --> 00:10:17,910 The technology did suggest something to me, 240 00:10:17,910 --> 00:10:20,027 but it did not force my hand, 241 00:10:20,027 --> 00:10:22,744 and I think this happens very often. 242 00:10:22,744 --> 00:10:25,370 You know, engineers are very smart, 243 00:10:25,370 --> 00:10:26,926 and despite occasional frustrations 244 00:10:26,926 --> 00:10:28,453 because I'm less smart, 245 00:10:28,453 --> 00:10:30,180 I've always enjoyed working with them 246 00:10:30,180 --> 00:10:32,258 and learning from them. 247 00:10:32,258 --> 00:10:34,600 Apropos, in the mid-'90s, 248 00:10:34,600 --> 00:10:37,291 I started talking to Microsoft 249 00:10:37,291 --> 00:10:39,679 about screen fonts. 250 00:10:39,679 --> 00:10:42,100 Up to that point, all the fonts on screen 251 00:10:42,100 --> 00:10:44,853 had been adapted from previously existing 252 00:10:44,853 --> 00:10:47,230 printing fonts, of course. 253 00:10:47,230 --> 00:10:49,733 But Microsoft foresaw correctly 254 00:10:49,733 --> 00:10:51,883 the movement, the stampede 255 00:10:51,883 --> 00:10:54,670 towards electronic communication, 256 00:10:54,670 --> 00:10:56,700 to reading and writing onscreen 257 00:10:56,700 --> 00:10:59,833 with the printed output as being sort of secondary 258 00:10:59,833 --> 00:11:02,056 in importance. 259 00:11:02,056 --> 00:11:05,635 So the priorities were just tipping at that point. 260 00:11:05,635 --> 00:11:07,829 They wanted a small core set of fonts 261 00:11:07,829 --> 00:11:11,134 that were not adapted but designed for the screen 262 00:11:11,134 --> 00:11:13,707 to face up to the problems of screen, 263 00:11:13,707 --> 00:11:17,549 which were their coarse resolution displays. 264 00:11:17,549 --> 00:11:21,080 I said to Microsoft, a typeface designed 265 00:11:21,080 --> 00:11:22,649 for a particular technology 266 00:11:22,649 --> 00:11:26,024 is a self-obsoleting typeface. 267 00:11:26,024 --> 00:11:28,118 I've designed too many faces in the past 268 00:11:28,118 --> 00:11:31,697 that were intended to mitigate technical problems. 269 00:11:31,697 --> 00:11:34,532 Thanks to the engineers, the technical problems went away. 270 00:11:34,532 --> 00:11:37,021 So did my typeface. 271 00:11:37,021 --> 00:11:40,152 It was only a stopgap. 272 00:11:40,152 --> 00:11:41,693 Microsoft came back to say that 273 00:11:41,693 --> 00:11:43,323 affordable computer monitors 274 00:11:43,323 --> 00:11:44,520 with better resolutions 275 00:11:44,520 --> 00:11:47,116 were at least a decade away. 276 00:11:47,116 --> 00:11:49,770 So I thought, well, a decade, that's not bad, 277 00:11:49,770 --> 00:11:52,182 that's more than a stopgap. 278 00:11:52,182 --> 00:11:54,183 So I was persuaded, I was convinced, 279 00:11:54,183 --> 00:11:56,505 and we went to work on what became Verdana 280 00:11:56,505 --> 00:11:58,177 and Georgia, 281 00:11:58,177 --> 00:12:00,517 for the first time working not on paper 282 00:12:00,517 --> 00:12:04,477 but directly onto the screen from the pixel up. 283 00:12:04,477 --> 00:12:08,330 At that time, screens were binary. 284 00:12:08,330 --> 00:12:11,370 The pixel was either on or it was off. 285 00:12:11,370 --> 00:12:14,225 Here you see the outline of a letter, 286 00:12:14,225 --> 00:12:15,692 the cap H, 287 00:12:15,692 --> 00:12:18,493 which is the thin black line, the contour, 288 00:12:18,493 --> 00:12:21,369 which is how it is stored in memory, 289 00:12:21,369 --> 00:12:23,039 superimposed on the bitmap, 290 00:12:23,039 --> 00:12:25,187 which is the grey area, 291 00:12:25,187 --> 00:12:27,024 which is how it's displayed on the screen. 292 00:12:27,024 --> 00:12:30,170 The bitmap is rasterized from the outline. 293 00:12:30,170 --> 00:12:32,411 Here in a cap H, which is all straight lines, 294 00:12:32,411 --> 00:12:34,499 the two are in almost perfect sync 295 00:12:34,499 --> 00:12:38,867 on the Cartesian grid. 296 00:12:38,867 --> 00:12:41,993 Not so with an O. 297 00:12:41,993 --> 00:12:44,720 This looks more like bricklaying than type design, 298 00:12:44,720 --> 00:12:47,621 but believe me, this is a good bitmap O, 299 00:12:47,621 --> 00:12:49,636 for the simple reason that it's symmetrical 300 00:12:49,636 --> 00:12:52,116 in both x and y axes. 301 00:12:52,116 --> 00:12:54,974 In a binary bitmap, you actually can't ask 302 00:12:54,974 --> 00:12:56,694 for more than that. 303 00:12:56,694 --> 00:12:59,098 I would sometimes make, I don't know, 304 00:12:59,098 --> 00:13:01,454 three or four different versions of a difficult letter 305 00:13:01,454 --> 00:13:02,960 like a lowercase A, 306 00:13:02,960 --> 00:13:06,500 and then stand back to choose which was the best. 307 00:13:06,500 --> 00:13:08,595 Well, there was no best, 308 00:13:08,595 --> 00:13:11,020 so the designer's judgment comes in 309 00:13:11,020 --> 00:13:12,409 in trying to decide 310 00:13:12,409 --> 00:13:15,450 which is the least bad. 311 00:13:15,450 --> 00:13:17,900 Is that a compromise? 312 00:13:17,900 --> 00:13:19,446 Not to me, if you are working 313 00:13:19,446 --> 00:13:22,533 at the highest standard the technology will allow, 314 00:13:22,533 --> 00:13:24,742 although that standard may be 315 00:13:24,742 --> 00:13:27,221 well short of the ideal. 316 00:13:27,221 --> 00:13:28,812 You may be able to see on this slide 317 00:13:28,812 --> 00:13:30,974 two different bitmap fonts there. 318 00:13:30,974 --> 00:13:32,670 The "a" in the upper one, I think, 319 00:13:32,670 --> 00:13:34,583 is better than the "a" in the lower one, 320 00:13:34,583 --> 00:13:37,159 but it still ain't great. 321 00:13:37,159 --> 00:13:39,066 You can maybe see the effect better 322 00:13:39,066 --> 00:13:42,442 if it's reduced. Well, maybe not. 323 00:13:42,442 --> 00:13:44,838 So I'm a pragmatist, not an idealist, 324 00:13:44,838 --> 00:13:46,341 out of necessity. 325 00:13:46,341 --> 00:13:48,270 For a certain kind of temperament, 326 00:13:48,270 --> 00:13:49,970 there is a certain kind of satisfaction 327 00:13:49,970 --> 00:13:53,608 in doing something that cannot be perfect 328 00:13:53,608 --> 00:13:57,477 but can still be done to the best of your ability. 329 00:13:57,477 --> 00:14:02,334 Here's the lowercase H from Georgia Italic. 330 00:14:02,334 --> 00:14:04,607 The bitmap looks jagged and rough. 331 00:14:04,607 --> 00:14:06,466 It is jagged and rough. 332 00:14:06,466 --> 00:14:08,462 But I discovered, by experiment, 333 00:14:08,462 --> 00:14:11,679 that there is an optimum slant 334 00:14:11,679 --> 00:14:13,625 for an italic on a screen 335 00:14:13,625 --> 00:14:15,957 so the strokes break well 336 00:14:15,957 --> 00:14:18,440 at the pixel boundaries. 337 00:14:18,440 --> 00:14:21,221 Look in this example how, rough as it is, 338 00:14:21,221 --> 00:14:23,271 how the left and right legs 339 00:14:23,271 --> 00:14:25,220 actually break at the same level. 340 00:14:25,220 --> 00:14:28,740 That's a victory. That's good, right there. 341 00:14:28,740 --> 00:14:31,918 And of course, at the lower depths, 342 00:14:31,918 --> 00:14:33,841 you don't get much choice. 343 00:14:33,841 --> 00:14:38,886 This is an S, in case you were wondering. 344 00:14:38,886 --> 00:14:41,040 Well, it's been 18 years now 345 00:14:41,040 --> 00:14:43,690 since Verdana and Georgia were released. 346 00:14:43,690 --> 00:14:45,780 Microsoft were absolutely right, 347 00:14:45,780 --> 00:14:48,194 it took a good 10 years, 348 00:14:48,194 --> 00:14:50,474 but screen displays now do have 349 00:14:50,474 --> 00:14:52,927 improved spatial resolution, 350 00:14:52,927 --> 00:14:56,399 and very much improved photometric resolution 351 00:14:56,399 --> 00:14:59,553 thanks to anti-aliasing and so on. 352 00:14:59,553 --> 00:15:03,250 So now that their mission is accomplished, 353 00:15:03,250 --> 00:15:04,980 has that meant the demise 354 00:15:04,980 --> 00:15:06,860 of the screen fonts that I designed 355 00:15:06,860 --> 00:15:09,511 for coarser displays back then? 356 00:15:09,511 --> 00:15:12,906 Will they outlive the now-obsolete screens 357 00:15:12,906 --> 00:15:15,078 and the flood of new web fonts 358 00:15:15,078 --> 00:15:16,581 coming on to the market? 359 00:15:16,581 --> 00:15:18,441 Or have they established their own 360 00:15:18,441 --> 00:15:20,679 sort of evolutionary niche 361 00:15:20,679 --> 00:15:24,416 that is independent of technology? 362 00:15:24,416 --> 00:15:26,087 In other words, have they been absorbed 363 00:15:26,087 --> 00:15:29,400 into the typographic mainstream? 364 00:15:29,400 --> 00:15:33,058 I'm not sure, but they've had a good run so far. 365 00:15:33,058 --> 00:15:35,553 Hey, 18 is a good age for anything 366 00:15:35,553 --> 00:15:37,704 with present-day rates of attrition, 367 00:15:37,704 --> 00:15:39,618 so I'm not complaining. 368 00:15:39,618 --> 00:15:42,457 Thank you. 369 00:15:42,457 --> 00:15:44,634 (Applause)