Digital Type archaeology: Principles of Digital Type 2.1

The August, 1981 Seybold Report article on aesthetics versus technology of digital type elicited requests for an additional article about digital typography for medium and low resolution devices, so it was followed by a pair of articles in February, 1982. As before, Chuck Bigelow wrote the article, Kris Holmes illustrated it, and Jonathan Seybold edited it and wrote an introduction (not reproduced here). 

Readers today will recognize that much has changed in digital type over the past 33 years, but because we constructed the article from first principles of digitization instead of focusing on technical details of then-current (and now obsolete) equipment, many parts of the article continue to be relevant today. Even the out-dated parts possibly remain interesting as historical references — it is fun to see this old stuff again, sometimes naive and funky, sometimes incisive and prophetic. And some things stubbornly no different today. As I've noted before, computers are 60,000 times faster now than in the 1960s, but digital fonts are not 60,000 times more legible; not even twice as legible. Despite all our technical progress, why is that?

This series of 10 pages is from The Seybold Report, February 8, 1982

 

 

 SeyboldReportPart2_01 

SeyboldReportPart2_02

SeyboldReportPart2_03

SeyboldReportPart2_04

SeyboldReportPart2_05

 

SeyboldReportPart2_06

SeyboldReportPart2_07

SeyboldReportPart2_08

SeyboldReportPart2_09

 

SeyboldReportPart2_10To be continued. . .


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