Notes

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

people found type with strong distinctive strokes easier to read than flattened styles; and a greater distinction between letters led to a clearer (and faster) digest of information. The research confirmed that the key areas that make a letter most distinctive are it’s top half and right side, the eye using these flagposts to confirm what it anticipates may be there.

–general research conclusions from the 1970s at the Royal College of Arts Readability of Print Research Unit

Variety in width is particularly important, with the upper half of letters being more readable than the lower half.

These two quotes above come just as I’ve been chatting with a parent of a student who has reading issues. I had mentioned to her some research on improved fonts for dyslexia like dyslexie. They make me wonder if the mental processing for those with reading issues is possibly mirror reversed or other variations of “normal” readers’ capabilities that could also be remedied by various font manipulations. If different fonts can be read better (speed and comprehension) by “normal” readers, then certainly one could optimize for non-normal readers.
Added on Sunday, December 24, 2017 afternoon

On a section of his website called Typecasting, the designer Mark Simonson

I liked the idea of people grousing about anachronistic typefaces in movies. I doubt many continuity, set decorators, or other hands on productions pay attention to these types of minutiae.
Added on Sunday, December 24, 2017 afternoon

Septmber

Added on Sunday, December 24, 2017 afternoon

Even those who had previously advocated the printed dissemination of wisdom complained of dumbing down: Hieronimo Squarciafico, who worked with Manutius, feared that the ‘abundance of books makes men less studious’, and he dreamed of a scenario in Elysian Fields in which great authors bemoaned that ‘printing had fallen into the hands of unlettered men, who corrupted almost everything’. Of particular concern was the digested read and the accessible history–knowledge falling within the hands of those who had previously regarded it as being beyond their reach.

This sounds like the lamentation of every age even into the modern world of the blogosphere and even later Twitter and even the self-publishing platforms offered by Amazon. Still somehow the cream manages to rise to the top.
Added on Sunday, December 24, 2017 afternoon

Guide to highlight colors

Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through

Some interesting tidbits interspersed in a text written by someone who obviously loves the typographic arts.

At times the languages seems a bit too flowery, but it’s often in service of describing the character in language of the visual aspects of the fonts themselves. The potential false dichotomy is that these feelings may not be evoked the same way by everyone experiencing them in person.