Fortunately, I was given the freedom and support to do a lot of experimental work and independent research. As I studied typography, I kept getting into the details of type more and more. ‘I went to risd for their strong typography programme. He acknowledges that he has been ‘very lucky’ in the way he received his education, first as a graphic design student at the Rhode Island School of Design (risd), where he now teaches part-time, then as an apprentice at Font Bureau. Highsmith trained with some of the best in the business – Matthew Carter, David Berlow and Tobias Frere-Jones. Highsmith, 32, is also one of the few young type designers who learnt the craft in the way it used to be taught for centuries: through apprenticeship. With families such as Stainless / Dispatch, Prensa and Amira, Cyrus Highsmith has established himself as one of the truly original new voices in American type design. Yet his greatest strength lies in his newly designed text faces. Highsmith has done his share of revivals and historical studies – he digitised some of the twentieth century’s most fragile display faces, worked on a redesign of News Gothic and drew a contemporary version of Scotch Roman for The Wall Street Journal. In this context, the work of Cyrus Highsmith, staff designer at Boston’s Font Bureau, is a welcome exception. Most recent American text faces are based on (and justified by) letterforms from the past – the results ranging from faithful revivals and smart re-interpretations to postmodern pastiches, parodies and lame nostalgia. Those who create ambitious text type families often seem to be taking clues from past masters in a very direct way – quite different from their European peers, who have a more independent relationship to tradition. Quite a few independent North American type designers have built a career out of whipping up one charming but ultimately meaningless style exercise after another. In Holland or Germany, designing a new text typeface conceived from scratch is on every young type designer’s list. The best of European type design shows a critical awareness of traditional principles, while being radically functionalist at the same time. Does small print help people focus of reading the details, or are they just trying to slip something past us.In recent years, a dichotomy between type designing strategies in (northern) Europe and North America has become apparent. On your site it is likely that smaller fonts will be read more carefully, and larger fonts will be scanned.Īside – based on the research that was done I started to wonder if that is why in legal documents they refer to the small print. At the end of the day everything is relative. If you audience is likely to be wearing corrective lenses it is probably not a good idea to use a small font for large blocks of text. Understanding your audience is critical to selecting a font. Note: Font size impacts page experience metrics, page speed, accessibility and usability. To understand what font size to use you need to understand your target audience, the message you are trying to communicate, and what you want them to do (amongst other things). There are a vast number of parameters to consider when writing text for the web and font size is just one of them. Note: The authors of the study are quick to point out that you shouldn’t rush out and reduce the size of the font across your website, with the hopes of getting people to read more of your site. They start with headlines in a larger font that are scanable so that the reader can quickly decide if they want to read the article or not, and then they get into the smaller print for the body of the text. When thinking of newspapers and news sites this makes sense. In general the findings showed that readers where more focused on reading when the font was smaller than when the font was larger. In a study released by The Poynter Institute they found that readers of news websites where encouraged to read more when the font was smaller, and scan more when the font was larger. There are many factors to consider font type, font size, font color, background color, bold, italic, writing style… Getting people to read and understand what it is that your website is trying to communicate is not as simple as one might think.
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