10 facts about Past and Future of Typography from ex-Google Fonts man.

Geekettes is a community of women dedicated to helping aspiring and established female tech innovators. It hosts talks to inspire and motivate, workshops to teach and refine skills and organizes one-of-a-kind hackathons to bring women together to create unique, original products. I found out about Geekettes after meeting it’s wonderful founder Jess Erickson at 500 startups and have been following the NYC wing ever since.

Fil Zembowicz talks at the NYC Geekettes event. His inspiration: “Hack the planet” font and works of Mr.Doob + Mike Boostock.

Yesterday Fil Zembowicz, former Product Manager of the Google Fonts project, gave a great talk on Past, Present and Future of typography. Here are 10 takeaways, quick facts and useful links&tips for anyone who is curious enough to care.

1. “Typeface” and “font” are not the same: first is a set of styles of specific font, second — a collection of characters, one particular style. Dig deeper here.
2. There are many notions in typography that formed due to their historical nature: e.g. serif came from calligraphy, leading (the space in between lines) depended on how much of actual lead was physically in between, inkwells prevented bleeding of the ink in letterpress design.
3. There is a never-ending debate whether serif or sans serif font style is better for reading. Yes, serif makes it easier to recognize each character in particular. As for readability of texts, numerous studies often contradict each other and the main takeaway is that it’s less dependent on a font, but more on the reader’s cognition.
4. This wonderful tool designed by Fil helps test the problems in font spacing — go to “words” section for a quick access to any possible character combinations (re-organized dictionary!).
5. Unfortunately the vector nature of fonts does not always allow each edge to perfectly fit every pixel: this is where the notion of rasterization comes to play. You can manually assign this to any given font size and this is called “hinting” — the use of mathematical instructions to adjust the display of an outline font so that it lines up with a rasterized grid. Takes time but makes perfect.

http://www.djr.com/backasswards/

What is the future of fonts?

1. GitHub has been widely used as a platform for open-source collaboration for code, but is yet to be utilized for font creation and testing.
2. There is a huge demand for developing more international fonts and contributing to “localization” of latin-based ones. Most challenging issues: rendering and ligatures.
3. A whole division at Google Fonts is currently working on compression algorithms. Funny enough almost all of them are Swiss so they utilize names of Swiss bread types, for example Woff.
4. Font subsetting is an interesting issue that influences page load times (you only request the limited amount of characters you need).
5. A great tool that helps understanding the underlaying design of a font: Metapolator — its control points, curves, thickness etc.