Typography is the way letterforms are arranged to allow clear communication of the words that the letters form. Typography is hugely important in human culture as writing is one main mediums in which we communicate. With the advent of digital communications it is becoming more important . Particular care is taken when designing a typeface to make sure it can convey a clear message as well as providing a message in the style of the typeface itself. I’ll be looking at and comparing different typefaces to show what I think make good and bad typefaces.
Apple’s released a new font with iOS 9. It is a modified version of Helvetica(design by Miedinger and Hoffman in 1957) San Francisco has been modified to work better on small screens like iPhone.
Below is an image showing the 2 typefaces:
The First typeface is San Francisco. As you can see the letterforms are incredibly similar, with only a few style changes. San Francisco is straighter on the edges. This allows the letterforms to be compressed to form condensed versions of San Francisco but the spacing between each letter at the same size is larger in San Francisco than Helvetica. This means the individual letter form is easier to identify. This is really important for Apple when working with smaller screens. This allows them to use smaller font sizes but have high legibility.
This family of typeface is script or hand lettering style, I think there is a time and a place for proper hand lettering (actually hand drawn) but to type body text or to use fonts such Bradley Hand, Papyrus and similar typefaces. These typefaces try to be organic in design and follow between characters but, because the individual letters are created to work with each other letter in the Alphabet they do not flow together as well as a person hand writing. For me this makes the typeface hard and slow to read. Beatrice Warde stated in her speech “The Crystal Goblet, and why typography should be invisible” typography should not intrude upon the message of the written word. She liked that content of the words to wine and typography to a crystal goblet. This shows that we should consider typography as a carrier for a rich and meaningful content, The wine is this in her metaphor. Personally I think all typeface has a specific use, but to a certain degree a Designer needs to consider what is appropriate and in most cases script typeface isn’t the typeface to use.
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