Veronika Burian (Burian, 2016) wrote an article called Why Do We Need More Typefaces? In it she mentions:Īn effective way of weakening this question usually asked by lay persons is to pose another question, such as, ‘Do we have enough music, or clothes, or art?’ In the same spirit, I agree with Cyrus Highsmith’s reply, ‘You know, I heard the same thing about people!’. Most typefaces these days have webfont versions available, but does the typeface even support all the characters and symbols this academic article needs? Next scenario, the print edition will also be published online, on a webpage in HTML.
You could probably count the ones immediately available to you on your computer on one hand. How many typefaces do you think that are available that can handle this type of information? The fact is, actually not a lot. You may also need some dingbats (miscellaneous symbols). You would have the print edition in which you would have the Latin characters, possible small caps in upright and italic and oldstyle numerals, superscripts and subscripts, mathematical characters, foreign characters such as Greek for possible equations or formula, you also have tables of numerical data which you would need lining numerals. How many though are truly up to the job and able to handle the most complex and diverse content? Let us take an academic article (like in an academic journal) as a case study. Most historical typefaces are also available in a digital form.
We have over 150,000 typefaces (also known as fonts) available for direct download, more are added every week. If you or a graphic communication designer had to think of one typeface to use that may support an unusual character that you need, which is not supported in the typeface you are currently using, what would you try?: Minion by Robert Slimbach, I bet. We are currently not swamped with typefaces in this area. We need highly legible typeface families for extended reading which have a very broad language, character and symbol coverage. I am always amazed at the range of new typefaces being offered and new typographic possibilities, but there is a need in the market for very large and diverse typeface families. I work with typography week in week out designing, illustrating and typesetting books, publications and websites and there is an issue that keeps coming up, which I would like to discuss. The following issues are explored and discussed: new typeface designs and similarity to existing ones, what do we need in terms of character and language support, arguments around whether we actually need anymore typefaces, typeface designers doing extension work on existing typefaces, the rise of major brands commissioning new custom typefaces, to some examples of useful typefaces being offered.
This paper seeks to briefly explore the issue of design similarity and usefulness in contemporary typeface design and development.
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