March 25, 2005
Six new web faces
It’s about time too. I’m excited to see that Lucas de Groot has designed one of them. And from these previews these new faces certainly look good. However, the article states that “the fonts can be viewed on Macs only if the operator of a website has licensed them for embedding or if an individual user has licensed them for personal use.” Todd Dominey though has a different opinion. And me? I have no idea.
Am I the only dinosaur who’s wondering how they look at small sizes with font-smoothing off?
via whatdoiknow
Posted by Karen at March 25, 2005 06:08 AM in typographyBecause they were designed specifically for Cleartype on Longhorn (next-gen Windows), and not hinted, they won’t perform too well as bitmaps.
Posted by: Stephen Coles at March 25, 2005 08:08 AMDo you have font smoothing on when you surf?
Posted by: Karen at March 25, 2005 03:46 PMI’m sure they’ll look decent at any size (although maybe never 1-bit). My only real complaint is that the same glyph can render out differently (because of subpixel positioning). The only way around that is to banish WYSIWYG off the planet, like it deserves.
BTW, de Groot designed two of them.
hhp
Yes I do. I’ve become quite accustomed to it in OS X. Especially on my 15” PowerBook.
Posted by: Stephen Coles at March 28, 2005 01:56 PMHey, which is the other one that de Groot designed? I quite like the two serifs too, from the previews.
I’m still not used to font smoothing. Turn it off at small sizes. It’s alright above 12 pts, I guess.
Posted by: Karen at March 29, 2005 12:08 PMThe other de Groot contribution is Consolas (the mono font).
Font smoothing is a good thing as long as it’s done by a designer (directly or indirectly), not by a dumb algorithm (ie: the OSX font engine). Getting accustomed to it? Yeah, humans can get accustomed to anything… :-/
hhp
