Re: [GFD] Tom Phinney on Libre Fonts

I don't believe that the "mass" is a good judge of quality.  It takes 
time and study to know the
fine points of typography and design.
With the ease that technology has brought come also the pitfalls, that 
often quality
is disregarded in favor of quickly producing something.

I find this very obvious in music typography, there is a big gap
between professional hand engraved scores, and scores done by computer 
programs.
While it has evolved gradually during the 19th and 20th century, with 
the use of computers
a lot of the fine points and craftmanship have been lost.

Is it bad that there is choice, and that some of it isn't done by 
experts?  No, I don't think so,
as long as professional design is done by people who are knowledgable, 
and who know
their craft.  But unfortunately, that is not always the case.

I don't want to argue about taste, but I do believe someone who know 
what he is doing,
and who also knows what mistakes to avoid, will be a better judge for 
quality.

Kristof Bastiaensen

On 13-10-13 17:48, Vernon Adams wrote:
> This is actually the line i find most nonsensical ;)  Where is the harm in "junk fonts"? I just dont see it. Why even waste energy in jumping up and down about it? Unless you have a presentation to write to soothe the retired gatekeepers convention, i guess ;)  People find a use for junk fonts, people dont find a use for them. People find a use for super-standard fonts, people dont find a use for them. It's the same thing. Type is no longer a rarified, elistist product, that only stays consumed within rarified, elite sections of societies. Fonts are now as common as muck. I can see that some people's tastes are offended by this reality, but rarified 'tastes' will allways be offended, in fact the ability to have one's 'tastes' offended seems to be 'zeitgeist No. 1' in this post-post-modern age, everyone's now a taste-monger and quality-tester to the point where 'taste' and 'quality' have never had less concrete meaning, and 'good taste' and 'quality' are now firmly residing at street level, not at ivory tower level. Besides, it's all about Stats now. And also, irony, Thomas, your idea of 'good taste' may not even be on any 'taste' scale for the unwashed, twerking, instagrammified masses. The danger is, that you may now be the one lagging behind in taste and sense of quality :-)
> To me, your argument make no sense; doesn't Google (and the net as a whole) put these decisions (of taste and quality) in the hands of the experts par-excellance, aka 'the user'. If a font gets used 'en mass' then it has clearly passed the taste & quality & etc test. Are you suggesting that this very effective system would be better replaced by using a small group of 'experts' to deal with deciding what all users want? Quaint idea. Who would you pick to be in your gatekeeper group? And also, surely dont the webfont services provided by the big Font Foundries use your gatekeeper model? Why then have the google font servers managed under the same system? Isn't it better to have a breadth of diversity? Whats the big deal in 'unifying' font design in this day and age?
>
> -vernon
>
>
>
> On 13 Oct 2013, at 03:09, Pablo Impallari <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> "One of my perennial arguments with the folks at Google is about the fact that they didn’t have a very high quality bar at all, and let in an awful lot of fonts that I would say are simply crap or at least substandard, at an objective level. Some of the folks on the Google side of the fence say that they are simply giving their users free choice and that if one of the fonts I consider to be junk becomes popular, then that’s evidence that it was actually “good.” I don’t have much patience for this line of argument. I think that Google is abandoning what it ought to see as a responsibility to be a gatekeeper not of taste, but of quality, given that it is not hard to find the expertise to deal with these things."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> October Webinars: Code for Performance
> Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance.
> Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from
> the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register >
> http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60134071&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk
> _______________________________________________
> Fontforge-devel mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-devel



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October Webinars: Code for Performance
Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance.
Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from 
the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register >
http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60134071&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk