It seems inevitable that the web will eventually force the big players to start giving away some of their wares for free. If you consider the some of the success stories of the web (Google, Flickr, eBay etc), offering a free service or product at a certain level seems to be the sure way to eventual adoption by the masses. Winning the trust and loyalty of the consumer is very often the result after the free trial or light version period, and there usually follows a willingness on behalf of the consumer to pay for a more in-depth version of the product or service.

Could typography on the web soon follow this trend? It seems very unlikely at the moment that any of the key players [Apple, Microsoft, Adobe] will jump but there is an emerging ground swell of appeal from the grass roots calling for more fonts to be made available in the public domain. Two open letters recently published are being passed around on the design/typography blog and forum circuit. Andrei Herasimchuk has written an open letter to John Warnock, CEO of Adobe, and Jeff Croft has written a counter plea to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Will anyone take action? It would be worth trying to get the major design and typographic associations, professional bodies, organisations and special interest groups to create some kind of central online petition which their respective online communities could sign up to. Of course it is worth pointing out that CSS2 does in fact have the code for downloadable fonts. The problem is that it’s not really easy to implement, there are licensing issues, and its slower than other means. Another way of embedding fonts into HTML pages, is sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) developed by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben using JavaScript and Flash.

Already it seems you can download Microsoft’s new vista fonts (don’t know if this is quite legal so I won’t include the link) but once they are out there, the likelihood is they will be used. However, if we want these new typefaces (designed specifically for the screen) to be freely available to everyone, shipping them with the OS, with all web browsers, and automatically embedding them in HTML pages is probably the only way to do it.

Then again, do designers really want to democratise design and typography or just pretend that they want to? The old worries that Apple’s eighties strapline ‘everyone’s an author’ (everyone’s a designer) conjure up still seem to linger in the air. The growing trend of template driven design on the web (there are a plethora of libraries available, free and for purchase) and movements such as Creative Commons seems to signal yet another new era of how design will be created, commissioned and consumed.

The zoom feature in OSX’s System Universal Access is fantastic for teaching purposes on screen not to mention its intended use. It overcomes those annoying problems of trying to point out tiny details in an image or small features typically hidden on the user interface of many software applications. Just a click and the screen smoothly zooms to where your cursor is! Slick. Another click and it zooms back to full screen mode. Simple and fast. Fluid and natural.

It’s the logical next step in the GUI metaphor enabling you to travel in the z dimension of the screen at last (or at least it gives the illusion of doing so). It could be the answer for on-screen reading provided the resolution of the type would scale as smoothly. John Maeda’s java calendars for Shishedo have previously demonstrated how this can be achieved and are emblematic of other similar work in this field, most of which has come from his own lab at MIT (which formerly had Muriel Cooper at the helm). David Small’s Talmud project also implemented fluid zooming through landscapes of large textual spaces and some of Maeda’s other protégés, notably Ben Fry have continued to produce work that uses computation to put typography in the z dimension in realtime.

It’s not a new GUI solution by any means (MIT’s Hiroshi Ishi’s group developed a ZUI and some MIT researchers formed the company GeoPhoenix Inc.) but it does seem perfect for smaller devices where screen real estate is at a premium. What is wonderful about this Apple feature is the ease of use, the smooth and fast interaction (which makes it feel natural) and the fact that its just there, built-in, shipped quietly as an integral part of the OS without any fuss. By the way, I haven’t even mentioned the other features in Universal Access (including the VoiceOver, Display and other functionality for controlling keyboard, mouse and trackball).

Of course, there is just one other thing! Using it is fun, it has that addictive interactive quality, zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out…

It’s been a month since I last posted…sounds a bit like confession! Hope I haven’t lost your attention. Anyway, here are my latest musings.

Years ago I read Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which really gave me food for thought. Every time I watch Sky News I am reminded of parts of his book, especially his description of modern audiences and their insatiable need to be entertained no matter what the content or context of their attention. I am currently reading Richard Lanham’s book The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, and much of what he has to say echoes Postman’s earlier observations.

Lanham acknowledges that in this saturated information age, human attention has become the scarcest resource. He believes that we have moved from a world of stuff to style, and that we now live in an attention economy.

Interestingly, Nicholas Negroponte began his book Being Digital with the premise that we had moved from a world of atoms to bits, from the real to the virtual. Lanham says that real or virtual no longer matter but the attention drawn around those worlds (be they real or virtual) is now our key concern.

What has this got to do with screen typography?
If we consider Lanham’s argument, then how can text (traditionally silent and contemplative) compete to hold the reader’s attention in a multimedia world?

This would appear to be the central dichotomy of my research into typography for the screen. Should text as we know and experience it in printed form become something altogether different on screen? Should we create screen typography that is nothing like print, but that is sensorial, kinetic and interactive? A typography that competes well in the multimedia world of the attention economy? Or, are we going to forever strive to conquer the shortcomings of the screen reading experience when compared with that of printed book and make its emulation the holy-grail for screen typography? Then again, is it just a matter of waiting it out, until screen technologies and resolutions become so fine that they eventually rival their paper counterpart as the number one substrate for text?

Lanham points out that it is probably pointless to argue about print or screen supremacy, because it seems almost all text is now digital in origin. The real challenge lies in designing for the wide range of ‘competing substrates for textual expression’ that are now available and vying for our attention. Admittedly, most of these substrates (other than printed forms) are screens of some kind or another (crt computer screens, liquid crystal display flat screens, plasma screens, pdas, mobile phones, electronic books, digital projectors, heads-up displays, goggles, VR helmets and environments etc).

I believe the screen is a central component of Lanham’s attention economy, because it offers a means by which new expression can be given to text in a way that printed form can not. Text on screens exists in a multimedia environment of sound, motion and interactivity. These are the lifeblood of Lanham’s attention economy and it seems only natural that these characteristics present new typographic design challenges in a screen context.

Lanham devotes much of his book to discussing ‘what’s next for text?’ He examines the shortcomings of Beatrice Warde’s famous crystal goblet analogy (an accepted treatise on the qualities of good print typography) in the context of the screen and the attention economy.

Warde agrues that typography should be like a crystal goblet containing a fine wine, a transparent container that does not taint the flavour of its contents but quietly enhances and supports the experience of drinking (reading). She proposes that well designed typography should go unnoticed, have an almost invisible style, that the audience should look through the surface (of printed typography) to get to the content and meaning beneath.

In direct contrast, Lanham states that looking through the surface is not enough to capture our audience’s attention amidst the deluge of information available in the digital world. The premise of Lanham’s book is the recognition that looking at something is now equally important as looking through it to get to and find meaning. Hence in Lanham’s attention economy, style is as important as substance or rather the trick is to see that style and substance, and our expectations of them have changed places.

If we consider screen typography from this position, it presents a wider field of design possibilities for this hitherto impoverished relation of its printed cousin.