Speaker
Nathan Willis
Description
Ubiquitous font menus and desktop font tools focus on letting users find the font they want via generic descriptors like Bold and Italic or with numeric coding schemes like CSS's weight-and-width model. But those labels and codes don't tell you much; font A at weight=500 may look nothing like font B at weight=500. This talk will present some food for thought on an alternate approach to navigating the parameters and design variations of a font library based on intrinsic characteristics. It draws on analysis of letterform detail and normalization I conducted during my PhD studies, and features lots of colorful graphs showing what facets of design open-source fonts cover and what facets of design-space they rarely explore.
