Marcel Moreau » Typography

Drink Coke. Period.

Marcel — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 03:27:11 +0000

My favorite scene from Helvetica.

Any questions? Of course not. Drink Coke. Period. Simple.

SimpleScott | Obama’s Creative Lead at An Event Apart Boston

Marcel — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:37:21 +0000

At the 2009 date of An Event Apart, one of the speakers was Scott Thomas. Scott was one of Barack Obama’s two design directors throughout his presidential campaign. He spoke on the second day, but my friend Dan and I had a chance to speak with him at the first night’s after party. A couple interesting things he had to say:

Scott was the person who chose to use the Gotham typeface as seen in all the “change” and “hope” material as seen below. John McCain’s campaign used the same typeface that’s on the Vietnam War Memorial. Gotham represented stability and a fresh start.
Over 46 revisions were done before Barack Obama’s website design was finalized
It was near impossible to contact Scott during the campaign via email. He would tell others to send multiple emails. He told his personal circle to just call him (also often repeatedly)
Many people would come out of the woodwork to request one-off things like tattoo designs and the like. “We’re trying to win an election and you want a tattoo design?”
Scott was not as heavily involved in the whitehouse.gov redesign, although it looks the same

Browser anti-aliasing: do you design your comps using bitmapped text?

Marcel — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 01:02:19 +0000

A while back, I wrote about how it irked me when web designers who use Helvetica and Lucida Grande for body text. Anti-aliased or not, those two type-faces do not look good at small sizes. Recently at Bridgeline, we had a debate on whether or not we should design our UI comps using anti-aliasing. We all agreed using a smooth setting looks better, but what do most Windows users see? Well it all lies in Microsoft’s ClearType setting, and the confusion around its default settings. As far as our corner of the office:

On my XP machine, I saw smooth text in IE7 but not Firefox
Coworker 1 (XP) saw smooth text in IE7 and Firefox
Coworker 2 (XP) saw smooth text in IE7 and Firefox
Coworker 3 (Vista) saw smooth text in both IE7 and Firefox
Friend (not in office) with Vista saw smooth text in IE7 but not Firefox

What is ClearType?

ClearType, according to Microsoft is:

an unprecedented innovation in font display technology that dramatically improves font display resolution and marks a genuine breakthrough in screen readability.

Sounds great, but Apple had very similar technology in 1976 with their Apple II computer – so it ended up being a lot of overhype for something that had already been estalished. In a nutshell, ClearType is a type of subpixel rendering. Instead of filling a pixel with a solid color, ClearType takes advantage of 3 sub-pixels within each pixel, and fills it with RGB values. So essentially you can think of an 800×600 monitor resolution as 2400×600. When rendering certain characters of a word that do not use all subpixels, ClearType will leave those su-pixels empty. My XP machine doesn’t any font-smoothing enabled, so the characters I see are jagged.

Notice that each pixel contains red, green, and blue subpixels.

So who has ClearType enabled by default?

Users with Windows XP who purchase a new machine or perform a fresh install will not have ClearType enabled by default (Internet Explorer 7 and Microsoft Office 2007 will use ClearType)
Users with Windows Vista who purchase a new machine or perform a fresh install will have ClearType enabled, but if they purchase the machine from a manufacturer, they may choose to disable this feature – most likely to save on processing bandwidth.
Either of these might be blown to shit by an IT worker who may have good reasons to choose one or the other

Sources and further reading

Wikipedia – ClearType

Why Do My Windows Vista Fonts Look Horrible?

Enable ClearType on Windows (video)

Display Type & the Raster Wars