| plaĢ ijāts |
Jul. 30th, 2014|12:42 pm |
no lieliskā žurnāla Emirge intervijas ar Zuzanu Ličkō.
E: Which of your typefaces do you like best in this respect?
ZL: Low resolution typefaces like Emperor Eight or Oakland Six, they really work well at every level on the computer. You can use them in high resolution programs and you can use them in MacPaint and they feel just as comfortable.
E: Sure, they feel comfortable to you and me and in relationship to the medium, but how are people supposed to understand this, and link that to print? It still looks very uncomfortable to people who eventually just want to read it.
ZL: But why is that? It's because they're not used to seeing low resolution type, I think.
E: Right! Not everybody is used to staring at a low resolution Macintosh screen all day like you. And your type is eventually used in print, people very seldom read it off the screen.
ZL: I know! But why did letter press type start to look a certain way, and why was that eventually accepted? Not because people were reading the type off the bed of the letterpress. They were still reading it off the printed page. That didn't have anything more to do with casting lead than it does with computer chips today, but that's where it comes from, and that's what we've gotten used to. It's the same with Blackletter, which was at one point more legible to people than humanist typefaces. That's a shocker. I agree with the fact that if you are setting books and other things that just need to be read and understood easily, you need to use something other than Oakland Six. In those cases you need to use something that is not necessarily intrinsically more legible, but that people are used to seeing. This is what makes certain typestyles more legible or comfortable. You read best what you read most. However, those preferences for typefaces such as Times Roman exist by habit, because those typefaces have been around longest. When those typefaces first came out, they were not what people were used to either. But because they got used, they have become extremely legible. Maybe some of my typefaces will eventually reach this point of acceptance, and therefore become more legible; two hundred years from now, who knows?
You read best what you read most.
[and you read lotsa, er, dung, doncha?] |
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