Beyond Arial, creative text design

Despite the generous selection of digital sources to choose from when designing the text, most users take hold of a few types such as Arial or Times New Roman.

One reason for this is that there are too many options, graphic designer Dan said Mayer. ”The selection of appropriate typography requires both intuition and knowledge of certain rules,” he says, “but it takes years of practice to master them.”

In an article for the trade publication “Smashing Magazine” Mayer makes a list of five rules of design, the latest of which is a paradox: “There are no rules.” This “rule” means that no rule is an eternal truth. While the printers are all agreed that a source must be very legible and follow the nature of the text, opinions diverge when there is a choice between types with serifs or without serifs.

A font “serif” is characterized by small spikes that decorate the letters. Examples of serif fonts are Times, Garamond or Georgia. By contrast, Arial, Verdana or Helvetica fonts without serifs are.

For a time it was felt that the font with serifs provided a focal point for the eye, says Herbert Braun, editor of the German magazine c’t. While working at a computer screen, the serifs are considered more of a distraction than an ornament. However, “lately, serif fonts have been going through a renaissance,” says Braun.

Among the reasons for this are the higher resolution of modern displays and advanced technologies such as the “anti-aliasing and subpixel translation, also called ClearType in Windows world. This technology smooths the edges of characters to cover exposed pixels, resulting in a clear translation of the sources.

“The readability is of great importance and constantly publish new findings,” says Lorenz Schirmer, Linotype font maker, Bad Homburg, Germany. The good readability depends also on the reading habits of the user and the paper used to print text.Schirmer private users advised to print a sample text from multiple sources to compare the results.

Braun added that there are alternatives to the types Arial, Verdana or Times New Roman when it comes to creating a website with style. Google, for example, offers a whole directory of freely available digital sources and can be integrated into HTML documents using the standard CSS web page design. Linotype has also a wide variety of types available free for noncommercial use.

“Users should remember that fonts are software too”, says expert in typography Schirmer. ”This means that when making a purchase not acquire ownership rights, but that only the license to use,” he says.

There are many free sources that come with few limitations, Braun added, as no special characters or kerning. “ The latter, which lacks Spanish translation, refers to the adjustment of two letters that appear farther apart than the rest, as in “saw” or “will.”

Ralf Herrmann, an expert in typography, discourages the use of “packages offered 1,000 sources in the media or Internet free font. It is low-quality sources, unsuitable even for professional use. But on sites like “Typografie.info” Internet is a good source of information and exchange, which allows the user to investigate viable sources for their projects.

“I would not recommend buying a commercial source for private use,” says Braun.However, this makes sense for business – for example, to design a company logo.Among the competitors are Linotype FontShop FSI International, based in Berlin, or International Typeface Corporation (ITC) in New York. Anyone with creative inclinations can even design your own font with tools like FontCreator, High-Logic.

The standard format OpenType (OTF) is designed for all operating systems by Microsoft and Adobe was published in 1996 by icrosoft. OTF is also supported by the Open Font Format Web Format (WOFF), which allows transfer of fonts in compressed format. WOFF is an important standard supported by all modern browsers.