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Type is something we consume
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in enormous quantities.
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In much of the world,
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it's completely inescapable.
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But few consumers are concerned to know
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where a particular typeface came from
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or when or who designed it,
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if, indeed, there was any human agency involved
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in its creation, if it didn't just sort of materialize
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out of the software ether.
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But I do have to be concerned with those things.
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It's my job.
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I'm one of the tiny handful of people
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who gets badly bent out of shape
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by the bad spacing of the T and the E
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that you see there.
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I've got to take that slide off.
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I can't stand it. Nor can Chris.
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There. Good.
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So my talk is about the connection
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between technology and design of type.
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The technology has changed
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a number of times since I started work:
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photo, digital, desktop, screen, web.
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I've had to survive those changes and try
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to understand their implications for what I do
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for design.
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This slide is about the effect of tools on form.
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The two letters, the two K's,
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the one on your left, my right, is modern,
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made on a computer.
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All straight lines are dead straight.
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The curves have that kind of
mathematical smoothness
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that the Bézier formula imposes.
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On the right, ancient gothic
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cut in the resistant material of steel by hand.
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None of the straight lines are actually straight.
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The curves are kind of subtle.
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It has that spark of life from the human hand
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that the machine or the program
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can never capture.
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What a contrast.
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Well, I tell a lie.
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A lie, at TED. I'm really sorry.
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Both of these were made on a computer,
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same software, same Bézier curves,
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same font format.
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The one on your left
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was made by Zuzana Licko at Emigre,
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and I did the other one.
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The tool is the same, yet the letters are different.
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The letters are different
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because the designers are different.
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That's all. Zuzana wanted hers to look like that.
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I wanted mine to look like that. End of story.
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Type is very adaptable.
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Unlike a fine art, such as sculpture or architecture,
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type hides its methods.
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I think of myself as an industrial designer.
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The thing I design is manufactured,
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and it has a function:
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to be read, to convey meaning.
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But there is a bit more to it than that.
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There's the sort of aesthetic element.
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What makes these two letters different
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from different interpretations by different designers?
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What gives the work of some designers
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sort of characteristic personal style,
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as you might find in the work of a fashion designer,
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an automobile designer, whatever?
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There have been some cases, I admit,
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where I as a designer
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did feel the influence of technology.
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This is from the mid-'60s,
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the change from metal type to photo,
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hot to cold.
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This brought some benefits
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but also one particular drawback:
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a spacing system that only provided
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18 discrete units for letters
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to be accommodated on.
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I was asked at this time to design
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a series of condensed sans serif types
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with as many different variants as possible
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within this 18-unit box.
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Quickly looking at the arithmetic,
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I realized I could only actually make three
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of related design. Here you see them.
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In Helvetica compressed, extra compressed,
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and ultra compressed, this rigid 18-unit system
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really boxed me in.
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It kind of determined the proportions
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of the design.
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Here are the typefaces, at least the lower cases.
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So do you look at these and say,
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"Poor Matthew, he had to submit to a problem,
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and by God it shows in the results."
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I hope not.
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If I were doing this same job today,
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instead of having 18 spacing units,
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I would have one thousand.
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Clearly I could make more variants,
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but would these three members
of the family be better?
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It's hard to say without actually doing it,
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but they would not be better in the proportion
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of a thousand to 18, I can tell you that.
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My instinct tells you that any improvement
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would be rather slight, because they were designed
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as functions of the system they were designed to fit,
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and as I said, type is very adaptable.
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It does hide its methods.
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All industrial designers work within constraints.
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This is not fine art.
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The question is, does a constraint
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force a compromise?
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By accepting a constraint,
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are you working to a lower standard?
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I don't believe so, and I've always been encouraged
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by something that Charles Eden said.
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He said he was conscious of working
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within constraints,
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but not of making compromises.
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The distinction between a constraint
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and a compromise is obviously very subtle,
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but it's very central to my attitude to work.
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Remember this reading experience?
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The phone book. I'll hold the slide
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so you can enjoy the nostalgia.
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This is from the mid-'70s early trials
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of Bell Centennial typeface I designed
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for the U.S. phone books,
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and it was my first experience of digital type,
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and quite a baptism.
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Designed for the phone books, as I said,
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to be printed at tiny size on newsprint
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on very high-speed rotary presses
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with ink that was kerosene and [lampblack].
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This is not a hospitable environment
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for a typographic designer.
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So the challenge for me was to design type
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that performed as well as possible
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in these very adverse production conditions.
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As I say, we were in the infancy of digital type.
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I had to draw every character by hand
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on quadrille graph paper
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— there were four weights of Bell Centennial —
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pixel by pixel, then encode
them rastaline by rastaline
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for the keyboard.
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It took two years, but I learned a lot.
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These letters look as though they've been chewed
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by the dog or something or other,
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but the missing pixels at the intersections
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of strokes or in the crotches
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are the result of my studying the effects
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of ink spread on cheap paper
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and reacting, revising the font accordingly.
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These strange artifacts are designed to compensate
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for the undesirable effects of scale
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and production process.
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At the outside, AT&T had wanted
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to set the phone books in Helvetica,
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but as my friend Erik Spiekermann said
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in the Helvetica movie, if you've seen that,
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the letters in Helvetica were designed to be
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as similar to one another as possible.
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This is not the recipe for legibility at small size.
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It looks very elegant up on a slide.
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I had to disambiguate these forms
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of the figures as much as possible in Bell Centennial
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by sort of opening the shapes up, as you can see
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in the bottom part of that slide.
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So now we're on to the mid-'80s,
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the early days of digital outline fonts,
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vector technology.
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There was an issue at that time
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with the size of the fonts,
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the amount of data that was required to find
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and store a font in computer memory.
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It limited the number of fonts you could get
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on your typesetting system at any one time.
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I did an analysis of the data,
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and found that a typical serif face
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you see on the left
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needed nearly twice as much data
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as a sans serif in the middle
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because of all the points required
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to define the elegantly curved serif brackets.
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The numbers at the bottom of the slide, by the way,
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they represent the amount of data
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needed to store each of the fonts.
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So the sans serif, in the middle,
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sans the serifs, was much more economical,
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81 to 151.
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"Aha," I thought. "The engineers have a problem.
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Designer to the rescue."
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I made a serif type, you can see it on the right,
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without curved serifs.
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I made them polygonal, out
of straight line segments,
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chamfered brackets.
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And look, as economical in data as a sans serif.
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We call it Charter, on the right.
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So I went to the head of engineering
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with my numbers, and I said proudly,
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"I have solved your problem."
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"Oh," he said. "What problem?"
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And I said, "Well, you know, the problem
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of the huge data you require
for serif fonts and so on."
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"Oh," he said. "We solved that problem last week.
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We wrote a compaction routine that reduces
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the size of all fonts by an order of magnitude.
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You can have as many fonts on your system
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as you like."
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"Well, thank you for letting me know," I said.
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Foiled again.
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I was left with a design solution
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for a nonexistent technical problem.
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But here is where the story sort
of gets interesting for me.
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I didn't just throw my design away
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in a fit of pique.
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I persevered.
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What had started as a technical exercise
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became an aesthetic exercise, really.
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In other words, I had come to like this typeface.
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Forget its origins. Screw that.
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I liked the design for its own sake.
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The simplified forms of Charter
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give it a sort of plain-spoken quality
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and unfussy spareness
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that sort of pleased me.
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You know, at times of technical innovation,
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designers want to be influenced
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by what's in the air.
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We want to respond. We want to be pushed
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into exploring something new.
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So Charter is a sort parable for me, really.
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In the end, there was no hard and fast causal link
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between the technology and the design of Charter.
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I had really misunderstood the technology.
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The technology did suggest something to me,
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but it did not force my hand,
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and I think this happens very often.
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You know, engineers are very smart,
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and despite occasional frustrations
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because I'm less smart,
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I've always enjoyed working with them
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and learning from them.
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Apropos, in the mid-'90s,
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I started talking to Microsoft
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about screen fonts.
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Up to that point, all the fonts on screen
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had been adapted from previously existing
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printing fonts, of course.
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But Microsoft foresaw correctly
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the movement, the stampede
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towards electronic communication,
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to reading and writing onscreen
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with the printed output as being sort of secondary
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in importance.
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So the priorities were just tipping at that point.
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They wanted a small core set of fonts
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that were not adapted but designed for the screen
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to face up to the problems of screen,
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which were their course resolution displays.
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I said to Microsoft, a typeface designed
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for a particular technology
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is a self-obsoleting typeface.
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I've designed too many faces in the past
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that were intended to mitigate technical problems.
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Thanks to the engineers, the
technical problems went away.
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So did my typeface.
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It was only a stopgap.
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Microsoft came back to say that
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affordable computer monitors
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with better resolutions
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were at least a decade away.
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So I thought, well, a decade, that's not bad,
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that's more than a stopgap.
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So I was persuaded, I was convinced,
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and we went to work on what became Verdana
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and Georgia,
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for the first time working not on paper
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but directly onto the screen from the pixel up.
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At that time, screens were binary.
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The pixel was either on or it was off.
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Here you see the outline of a letter,
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the cap H,
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which is the thin black line, the contour,
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which is how it is stored in memory,
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superimposed on the bit map,
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which is the grey area,
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which is how it's displayed on the screen.
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The bit map is rasterized from the outline.
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You know, here in a cap H, which is all straight lines,
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the two are in almost perfect sync
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on the Cartesian grid.
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Not so with an O.
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This looks more like bricklaying
than type or something,
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but believe me, this is a good bitmap O,
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for the simple reason that it's symmetrical
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in both x and y axes.
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In a binary bitmap, you actually can't ask
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for more than that.
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You know, I would sometimes make, I don't know,
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three or four different versions of a difficult letter
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like a lowercase A,
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and then stand back to choose which was the best.
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Well there was no best,
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so the designer's judgment comes in
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in trying to decide
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which is the least bad.
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Is that a compromise?
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Not to me, if you are working
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at the highest standard the technology will allow,
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although that standard may be
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well short of the ideal.
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You may be able to see on this slide
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two different bitmap fonts there.
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The "a" in the upper one, I think,
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is better than the "a" in the lower one,
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but it still ain't great.
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You can maybe see the effect better
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if it's reduced. Well, maybe not.
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So I'm a pragmatists, not an idealist,
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out of necessity.
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For a certain kind of temperament,
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there is a certain kind of satisfaction
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in doing something that cannot be perfect
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but can still be done to the best of your ability.
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Here's the lower case "h" from Georgia italic.
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The bitmap looks jagged and rough.
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It is jagged and rough.
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But I discovered, by experiment,
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that there is an optimum slant
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for an italic on a screen
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so the strokes break well
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at the pixel boundaries.
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Look in this example how, rough as it is,
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how the left and right legs
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actually break at the same level.
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That's a victory. That's good, right there.
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And of course, at the lower depths,
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you don't get much choice.
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This is an "s" in case you were wondering.
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Well, it's been 18 years now
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since Verdana and Georgia were released.
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Microsoft were absolutely right,
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it took a good 10 years,
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but screen displays now do have
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improved spacial resolution
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and very much improved photometric resolution
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thanks to anti-aliasing and so on.
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So now that their mission is accomplished,
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has that meant the demise
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of the screen fonts that I designed
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for courser displays back then?
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Will they outlive the now obsolete screens
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and the flood of new web fonts
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coming on to the market?
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Or have they established their own
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sort of evolutionary niche
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that is independent of technology?
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In other words, have they been absorbed
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into the typographic mainstream?
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I'm not sure, but they've had a good run so far.
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Hey, 18 is a good age for anything
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with present day rates of attrition,
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so I'm not complaining.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)