Type at the Crossroads

Filmed on October 15, 2011, at “Pivot: AIGA Design Conference”

About this video

More than twenty years ago, Jonathan Hoefler made it his mission to promote desktop publishing (and shush its critics) by providing designers with a new generation of fonts: attractive and useful designs which set a new standard in quality and dependability for that technology. Today, as webfonts are buoyed by a wave of early-adopter enthusiasm, they’re marred by a similar unevenness in quality, and it’s not just a matter of browsers and rasterizers, or the eternal shortage of good fonts and preponderance of bad ones. There are compelling questions about what it means to be fitted to the technology, how foundries can offer designers an expressive medium (and readers a rich one), and what it means for typography to be visually, mechanically, and culturally appropriate to the web. This is an exploration of this side of web fonts, and a discussion of where the needs of designers meet the needs of readers.

Speaker bio

Jonathan Hoefler is a typeface designer and an armchair type historian who specializes in the design of original typefaces. Named one of the forty most influential designers in America by I.D. magazine, Hoefler’s publishing work includes award-winning original typeface designs for Rolling Stone, Harper’s Bazaar, the New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated and Esquire; his institutional clients range from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to the rock band They Might Be Giants. Perhaps his best known work is the Hoefler Text family of typefaces, designed for Apple Computer and now appearing everywhere as part of the Macintosh operating system. Hoefler’s work has been exhibited internationally, and is included in the permanent collections of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2002, The Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) presented Hoefler with its most prestigious award, the Prix Charles Peignot for outstanding contributions to type design.