Another good resource about typography with a focus in responsive layouts http://informationarchitects.net/blog/responsive-typography-... .
Five minute guide to better typography
91–100 of 133 posts
Re: Five minute guide to better typography
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typography can be understood mathematically to the extent that communication can be understood mathematically. You're never going to account for style, trends, or connotation. Same with baseball, by the way. Advanced analytics can complement and enhance your understanding of baseball. But there are people involved. It will never be as straightforward as throw a curve because the count is 3 and 1 in this situation. Hu…
Baseball is... I mean if a team of engineers can design a rocket that lands vertically, I am fairly certain they could design a robot that hits balls with a bat. In fact I am surprised we don’t already have robot baseball. Typography is supposed to be perceived by human brains. So it will be subject to interpretation. Baseball is absolute: you can measure where the ball flew, where it landed, and who caught it.
It's amazing how blind to humanity we developers can be.
If you take the human out of the batters box, you're no longer playing baseball. Baseball is a game. Played by humans for the sake of competition. If you build a robot that is able to hit every ball. Guess what? There's no point in playing baseball anymore. Have you "solved" baseball? Or have you destroyed the usefulness of it?
Approaching baseball by solving the physics of the bat and ball is completely missing the point of the game.
Trying to "solve" typography is equally meaningless. There are no definite answers to be found for the meaning of Coca-Cola red or IBM blue.
Re: Five minute guide to better typography
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typography can be understood mathematically to the extent that communication can be understood mathematically. You're never going to account for style, trends, or connotation. Same with baseball, by the way. Advanced analytics can complement and enhance your understanding of baseball. But there are people involved. It will never be as straightforward as throw a curve because the count is 3 and 1 in this situation. Hu…
I agree that the number of data points needed for study and the number of variables involved are both key factors. The one area that comes to mind where a approach might be easiest is closed platforms like the hardware Kindle reader -- for example, measuring read times by a large population of the same text, with varying fonts, on the same hardware. Improved typography might reduce read times some modest percentage o…
Sure you can use ML and test subjects to maximize readability, but that's only one part of typography. Akin to Google beta testing shades of blue. http://www.zeldman.com/2009/03/20/41-shades-of-blue/
Re: Five minute guide to better typography
#94I have persistently encountered the same problem in this space. Most people I've worked with write documents using the last formatted document they made as a template for the next. Tracing back through their history of documents you find that they are all based off one person who decided it was a good idea to mix fonts and colours of headings, and mess around with font sizes and then save it all as default heading an…
The book “the Mac is not a typewriter” ( https://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-2nd/dp/0201782634 ) may help get them some idea about style. It is 15 years old, targets print, and is aimed at Mac users, but that doesn’t matter that much. (For PC users, there is “the PC is not a typewriter” ( https://www.amazon.com/Pc-not-typewriter-Robin-Williams/dp/0... ), but that is even older, so I’m not sure it will be more u…
Fifteen? I read that by 1991, latest. It’s nearly thirty. And it’s just what I thought of here: this article has the same simple clarity.
Re: Five minute guide to better typography
#95A nice quick guide. Definitely eliminates a lot of experimentation when in hurry to get going. Here's a 10 second theory class: stick to the four principles of design - remember CRAP (not my theory though) - C: Contrast -> use contrasting design to make things that are supposed to be dissimilar look dissimilar. - R: Repetition -> repeat design patterns for similar items. Remember CSS? - A: Alignment -> don't leave an…
We learned this in my tech writing class back in school and I still call it to mind when laying out slides and things. Seemed silly at the time but it's very memorable!
Re: Five minute guide to better typography
#96It's a quest of mine to understand this subject mathematically. I'm convinced that typography is an exact science, it's just easier to use intuition than find the formulae that govern it. Like catching a baseball versus understanding gravity and drag. For example, when aligning that header, they're moving the leftmost pixels into alignment with the body's leftmost pixels. The correct state is well-defined, it's just…
I agree that typography could be an exact science, but I think starting with mathematics would be the wrong choice. Rather, it would be better to devise perceptual experiments and back fit a mathematical model to the results. The excellent LAB color space was created this way. Scientists used experiments - for example the MacAdam ellipse to measure what colors are distinguishable - then backfit a model to that. It in…
The CIELAB color space was an attempt to make an invertible and fast-to-compute (for simple hardware devices in the 1960s) approximation to the Munsell color space (a lookup table carefully constructed by studies and expert adjustments done by the Optical Society of America in the early 1940s).
Re: Five minute guide to better typography
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that typography could be an exact science, but I think starting with mathematics would be the wrong choice. Rather, it would be better to devise perceptual experiments and back fit a mathematical model to the results. The excellent LAB color space was created this way. Scientists used experiments - for example the MacAdam ellipse to measure what colors are distinguishable - then backfit a model to that. It in…
Edwin Land also made tremendous contributions to color science through empirical measurements and finding the deeper "mathematical" models[1]. Besides his scientific achievements, he was a real renaissance man, a tour de force of human intellect. Unfortunately, Josef Albers's pseudoscience[2] and artistic non-sense get most of the credit[3] when it comes to color theory. [1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/201…
I don’t think it’s fair to criticize Albers in this context, and this particular critique seems mostly like pedantic nitpicking at a fairly concise non-technical book; he wasn’t trying to establish a detailed technical model, but rather to teach artists to think. (“The book does not begin with optics and physiology of visual perception, nor with any presentation of the physics of light and wave length…. What counts here—first and last—is not so-called knowledge of so-called facts, but vision—seeing.”)
His book and teaching method are all about learning to work with colors through direct experience. To that end, he made students do numerous small projects with colored paper, etc.
(Have you read Albers’s book? I would definitely recommend it, with the proviso that you actually try to do Albers’s recommended exercises, which are really the important part of the book, instead of worrying too much about the text. Reading Albers’s book straight through is like reading a math textbook straight through without doing the problems.)
If you want to call Itten out for nonsensical babble though, go right ahead.
* * *
Edit: here’s Dorothea Jameson’s response to Alan Lee http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.470...
Re: Five minute guide to better typography
#98Helvetica and you're done. ^ My one sentence guide to better typography.
That's your guide to better typography for OSX users. Then we also have folks using Windows and Linux that doesn't ship with Helvetica. Worth knowing!
Re: Five minute guide to better typography
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Credit for color science goes to the scientists, credit for artistic effects using color goes to the artists. There's plenty to go around. Jan Koenderink's book on color measurement looks good.
The problem isn't that he used color to make interesting new art. I think he explored new areas of color which were not known before - and I applaud his artistic efforts. However, Josef Albers went beyond his art to make false claims about color theory, how the human brain perceives color and made broad generalizations - based on anecdotal evidence and intuition. He went unchallenged for the most part. See the critic…
I recommend Mark Fairchild’s book Color Appearance Models.
Re: Five minute guide to better typography
#100Great guide.
Interested to see the advice on doubling type-size for contrast. I thought sticking to the typography scale (10, 11, 12, 14, 16 etc) was a golden rule. The x2 factor looks good though.
And now I can reliably type -, –, and –. That alone's worth the read.