17th June. It was a day of hardcore weather to be in Brighton, a day when I had a complete failure of iOS and the day of the First conference on Web Typography in the world let alone the UK. The failures of the iOS are relevant because I lost half my (not so) Evernote’s and have to rely of hastily scribbled glyphs written in the gloom of the Brighton Dome Corn Exchange.
The web is going through something of a upheaval, spear headed by change in attitudes towards layout as viewports grow smaller and varied, and as a result a rethink of how legibility is becoming increasingly important with tech savvy consumers. In 2007 Håkon Wium Lie, Chief Technology Officer at Opera, announced that the Opera browser will start supporting the @font-face rule, thus starting a review of how designers look at fonts on the web, and opening up a plethora of new and exciting font faces for us to play with.
Fast forward to the stormy day in June and we have pretty much hit the ground running at Ampersand, straight into Vincent Connare the now (in)famous creator of the font designers love to hate. His talk was a yarn of old stories from freshman years at a young Internet Explorer and the steps he made in creating the font-that-will-not-be-named from reading the Watchmen amongst other comics of the time.
Having Connare opening the event is testament to the conferences organisers their attention to detail, and passion for a fledgling medium. Vincent explained that fonts should be used in context and purposefully. He presented example slides of Comic Sans (Noo!) in a number of uses both relevant and downright bizarre. The former being signage for the 99p store and the latter instructions for an emergency defibrillator!
Leading on neatly from Vincent’s annotations on font context was Jason Santa Maria on the intricacies on selecting the right font for the right job and understanding that good typography is invisible to the user. This lead me to recall the well worn web design phrase ‘Don’t make me think!’. As designers we should be creating experiences (shudder) that don’t force the user to ask questions or figure out a puzzle, but guide them along making every action enjoyable (‘Don’t expect people to decode’ – Jon Tan), Selecting the right font is part of this process. Jason mentioned that type has a ‘dual life’ of readability and aesthetic. A user doesn’t care what the rationale was behind choosing Futura PT for your design was. They are more likely to skim read and fixate on certain areas of the sentence anyway. It’s not about ‘can I read it’ more ‘do I want to read it’.
Jon Tan (@jontangerine) then got philosophical by throwing Seth Godins lizard brain (or Amygdala) theory into the mix. This is prehistoric emotional trigger that gives every object an expressive response to everything. In reference to Jason Santa Maria beforehand, Jon stated that the typeface chosen is seen and felt before the content is read, ‘Don’t think, Feel’, he said, quoting Bruce Lee. He then showed some incredible work Reid Miles did for the Blue Note record label, truly timeless and inspiring stuff.
The opening of the conference really drove home the emotional connection point, which I believe is too easily overlooked. Just because a typeface looks nice on a page doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s being used in the best context when it comes to web. This of course transcends all communicative media, but it seems that only now is it being taken seriously for our medium.
Next up was Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler & Frere-Jones, my first experience of listening to a typographer ‘proper’ and the first ‘whooping’ of the day. Jonathan announced that Hoefler & Frere-Jones were releasing almost 100% of their font catalogue as web fonts; needless to say the crowd went wild, well as much as a bunch of Web Designers and Typographers can! What really struck a chord with me personally was the insight of how much work goes into creating a font. H&F’s latest font, Ideal Sans (which is lovely by the way), was started nearly 10 years ago and was only finished the Tuesday before the conference! He also expressed strikingly the pain staking process of rendering an insane amount of new glyphs for each of their font-families to make sure that they work perfectly across the web.
The impression you get from Vincent Connare, and subsequent speakers, at the beginning of the day was that a lot of the fonts they were producing in early operating systems were badly rendered versions of print fonts. And even a n00b like me quickly caught on that this system would sooner or later end in designer tears. Technical limitations of browsers, operating systems and, increasingly, devices all display fonts differently; often the difference is only slight. For great example of how fonts behave in this situation head over to the Typekit site and play around with one of their fonts using a handy little browser-sampling tool. Granted all of Typekits fonts are web-ready anyway, but you’ll get the idea. In his talk after lunch David Berlow also highlighted this as an issue that effected decisions the early days of his career when making fonts look legible from screen to printer.
My Creative Director here at Splash Worldwide first got me onto Tim Browns method of the modular scale for laying out designs and I have to admit somehow it works! To summarise: “A modular scale is a sequence of numbers that relate to one another in a meaningful way”. By using this method (amongst a selection of others he outlines) the spacing and sizing in your designs all of a sudden have a context. It was even better hearing it from the guy himself. He also reinforced a niggling suspicion I have that web designers are essentially just trying things out and seeing what sticks rather than having a set solid rules to work by. I managed to collar him at the end of the day and talk further about this methodology and generally what it means to be a designer in this industry. His underlying message was ‘I don’t know if this is right or not but, hey, it feels good!’ And why not too! How else are we going to grow this industry if we don’t take chances? I hear you cry ‘My body text is 12 point and my headers go up in increments of 2, what’s wrong with that?’ well, nothing really, but essentially it’s just a arbitrary number. So what’s wrong with having a methodology behind your sequencing? Give it a try and I’m sure it will get you thinking in your next design!
The last talk of the day was refreshingly up beat and light after the intensity (for me anyway!) of John Daggett, from Firefox, discussing the advances they are making in browsers for CSS3 web fonts (for more information check out http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/). Mark Boulton bounded through a generally forward thinking presentation of theories and ideas about the progression of web design in regards to layout and the limitations of the canvas. He motions for us designers to think more around content and design out from that, rather than design and then crowbar the content in (we’re all guilty of it! No? Well, some of us then). But unfortunately his ‘Designing for Chaos’ theory threw up more questions than answers, not a bad thing by any stretch. He says ‘If you don’t know your content, go to the pub!’. Fair enough, but I’ve worked on plenty of clients where we’ve been asked for ‘a look and feel’ design and then the content gets thrown in at the eleventh hour, in some cases, at the detriment of the design. After I fretfully tweeted this after the conference, Mark was good enough to respond with ‘It’s the norm unfortunately. Lots of education, process change and pain awaits.’ And there’s the key word ‘education’, the principal challenge that faces this industry. I have a lot of respect for Mark Boultons theory and I have a feeling it will be one that will take time, but will eventually be common practice in web design circles. I will certainly be following it closely.
Ampersand made me a Typophile. I still feel like the novice compared to most of the attendees, but I now seem to see fonts everywhere and in every context. It’s annoying for my colleagues and friends when every time type comes up in conversation my two pence gets clumsily wedged into it. The day was an inspiring and exciting trip through fonts and type, and is a good reflection of the state of the industry at the moment. I look forward to its return with a new found fervour.
To sum up I’ll leave that to Jason Santa Maria “This is a fantastic time to be a designer, because someone has opened the door again”.
Special thanks specifically to Richard Rutter, who brought the whole thing together tremendously.
Recommended reading and viewing:
Typekit’s blog: http://blog.typekit.com/
Lost World Fairs: http://lostworldsfairs.com/
Fonts in Use: http://fontsinuse.com/
Nice web type: http://nicewebtype.com/
