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The previous blockquote highlight, a large and black-striped box, seemed altogether too ‘heavy’ for the (currently) more minimalist design in use.
The problem in selecting a replacement was two-fold. I wanted an oblique style, that translated well across both the Mac and Windows platforms, that also managed to avoid font jaggies, something Windows users are typically faced with in many italicised fonts. Normally it’s one, or the other.
For example, Garamond renders quite beautifully on a Mac. It’s a little less so under Windows, particularly if in italics, although it’s certainly not vulgar. I find I use it more often than I once did.
I’d never actually stopped long to look at common Windows fonts, in italicised form, at least until today. Few do. It’s a horrible experience.
As I cycled through fonts1 using a few short phrases as mock text, and becoming increasingly despondent as time dragged on, I noted something odd.
The typeface Palatino rolled into the selector in the form of Palatino Linotype. Where were the jagged edges, the horrible malformed characters?
Emboldened by my discovery I decided to investigate a little further.
Palatino is an old style serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf at the German branch of Linotype. It was released in 1948 by the Linotype foundry.
In a stroke of pure unadulterated dumb luck I’ve stumbled on one of the few typically used typefaces that look just as stunning on a PC, as they do on a Mac. Including italics.
Random chance can be a surprisingly beautiful thing. Even on a PC.
- I still have the neck-pain from cringing (↩)
Typographic ruminations from Rob Keller — via Mr Dave Kellam.
"Today, we can’t help but point out that a dear friend of the site, the Daring Fireball, has defected to the dark side of typography [using Gill Sans] after years of successful commentary and practice." — Jesper comments on Gruber’s font selection.
I’ve
been playing this evening. A re-design1 on the tumblr platform — holy father, doesn’t
Garamond look downright gorgeous on the mac?!
Even the sub-par Windows font rendering engine does OK at the slightly larger font sizing2 I’ve selected. If you’re a Microsoft bunny and don’t have Garmond, then you should be ashamed3 and go get […]
"It’s been more than a few years that we’ve been thinking about how typefaces are made, how designers use them, and how readers experience them, and today’s typography.com is designed to present the complete picture." — typography, stat.
"Web designers depend on ten or so universally available fonts for their designs, and are reduced in large part to using Verdana and Arial over and over again." — a fantastic article on type management through CSS, using @font-face and hosted typefaces.
"I was bored tonight and was also bored with the default wallpapers that come loaded with the iPhone so I sat down and created these 16 wallpapers." — another stylish set of iPhone backgrounds - features typography.
"The ‘Apple way’ still makes far more sense to me, especially when you see the two side-by-side showing the odd relative scaling caused by the Microsoft philosophy." — this is a real no-brainer, OS X has always had a smarter font rendering engine.
Have to say, Fabiol does genuinely capture that ‘print’ feel, whereas Paperback, in my somewhat non-learnered opinion displays well as a heading - Palatino Sans strikes me as an ideal textual offset for photography. I know.. I have much to learn.
