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People read on their screens more than ever. Email communication, online newsletters, marketing messages—it’s not simply Web writing anymore. In our information overloaded world, keeping readers engaged isn’t easy.

When producing Windows 95, Microsoft commissioned celebrity typographer Mathew carter to design screen friendly fonts. The results were veranda and Georgia. Among others these were crafted with the goal of retaining legibility at both small point size and subjection to poor screen aliasing.

Universal web type

If the Web is the platform, and browsers are the gateways to it, then we don’t just need standards for layout and object rendering, but also a standard type library that is universally available to all, with a mechanism to allow new faces to be added over time.

This is not an alternative to @font-face—there will always be a place for very specialist typefaces for specific uses—but it is a compliment to it.

I would like to invite you to contribute how you think this might work. This is how I see it:

1. Organisation: We should form a grass roots organisation to provide universal Web type. It could be part of, or complimentary to the Web Standards Project and the W3C. It would reach out to, and include anyone who has a stake in implementing, creating or using Web fonts.
   
   
2. Structure: The organisation should be co-operative and democratic, with membership open to all. Intellectual copyright and assets would be jointly held by the group on behalf of everyone.
   
   
3. Purpose: The group would strive to find common ground between all stakeholders to research or support common standards, find funding to create a font library with complete typefaces that would be freely distributed.

The group could be funded by a mixture of micro-finance, donations of time and money, public funding and sponsorship. It would also affirm the right of type designers to proper remuneration for their work, and foster recognition of type’s importance to the Web.

I’m deliberately publishing this idea to elicit your feedback and comments. The way forward is not clear, and I do not claim to have the answers, but I believe that between all the interested parties—whether individuals, companies or organizations—we have the ability to give everyone a better typographic experience.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Web Design Tips | . You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.