Thought You Should See This

November 23, 2011

I loved this presentation by type specialist, Jonathan Hoefler, of the type foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones, which will obviously appeal to designers but also affords those from outside the discipline a great insight into the complexity and depth of the design process. At the recent AIGA Pivot conference, Hoefler detailed the intricacies of the type design process and explained the nuances and difficulties of translating type to new media such as the various screens most of us now take for granted and use so constantly throughout our every day. As he explained, the web in particular has been dominated by “pretty bad fonts”, and designers have for the most part capitulated to the demands and restrictions of the technology. According to Hoefler, designers have stopped thinking about what users/readers need and instead are content to serve up what they happen to have on hand.

Instead, he argued, there’s a real need for designers to take a step back and to create systems that can convert an idea into an appropriate form. Then he ran through the design decisions that went into Retina, a typeface Hoefler & Frere-Jones designed for the Wall Street Journal’s stock listing system. It’s totally fascinating, not least because many of the design decisions would never be noticed or experienced by the reader. And the idea of thinking about a system, not merely the tangible product or obvious outcome of a design process, is a smart one that pervades much of the most useful innovation thinking.

2:29pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLv7dxCJewUW
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