PRINT IS DEAD.....LONG LIVE PRINT

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The digital type revolution - how has digital type design impacted electronic and print design in the 21st century

What is Digital Type? Digital Type takes an aesthetic and technical approach to typography. First generation of technology resulted in “bitmap” fonts. Bitmaps were created on a sheet of graph paper over a drawn letter and coloring in the boxes (pixels) that fell within the outline of that letter. The advantage for bitmap fonts were that they could be edited for quality and readability. The disadvantage of requiring a separate font for each size and resolution resulted in taking a lot of space in memory. The next and current, generation of digital font technology provides for “scalable” outline fonts, which are smaller in memory and faster to process. Analog drawings of letters are plotted with a mouse or stylus to create and outline representation, which are installed on a computer’s operating system, which became easier to use and more functional for design. Unicode is like a worldwide alphabet that ideally gives every character used in every language its own official little spot in the typographic universe. OpenType is the coding format that makes it possible to accommodate a specific design of all these signs into one digital font. An OpenType font has thousands of possible ‘positions’, empty boxes each of which can contain a character for any writing system.

As technology advances in many areas, Typography has taken a digital turn. Some believe when Macromedia introduced Flash, it changed the face of digital typography.For me, using Adobe CS4, has been a challenging and rewarding experience. I know ART majors can use this software with ease. But, for technology major, it takes some times to know what function is used for and the importance of using the feature to create the look your going for. Using Flash and Photoshop, hierarchy(layouts) are important when it comes to designing. Just imagine they didn't have the options we have now with OpenType, in creating new families of type digitally.

Digital type can be seen throughout E-books, online news & magazine websites, and design software. Digital Type design progression also enables savvy designers to produce large families of typefaces without drawing each character separately and gives them more flexibility to be creative. A disadvantage to the revolution of digital type; for example, all of Kindle’s editions are set in the same bookish serif typeface (named Cæcilia); which takes away the essential newspaperness out of them and turns visual hierarchy of printed pages into a bland roster of headlines. “I started believing that I could see a future in which the Kindle would do for the written word what the iPod and iTunes have done for music, said Karrie Jacobs.” When I read that the feedback, I knew Kindle was on to something as was Apple for the iPod and iTunes. Technology takes time and creative thinking. The company that Amazon owns to create the Kindle has been working on making color ink for the Kindle, but there not there yet. But, I know that they will be soon. As for color, the digital will be the same as any newspaper or magazine layout on the newsstands.

As the digital type revolution continues, we start to seeing less paper and more forms of technology to produce digital type. From printers, readers, laptops, and software.

Citations:

• “A Brief History of Digital Type”. Retrieved:< http://www.fonts.com/AboutFonts/FontTechnologies/digitalformat.htm>
• “Adobe OpenType”. Accessed : 23 November 2009. Retrieved: <http://www.adobe.com/type/opentype/>
• Middendorp, Jan.” Is type design teaching losing its soul?” Eye (Croydon, England); v. 18 no. 71 (Spring 2009) p. 83.
• Jacobs, Karrie. “Rekindling the Book, Can Amazon’s new digital readers do for print what the iPod did for music?” MetropolisMag.com (March 2009)
• Saffo, Paul.” The electronic piñata.” ID (New York, N.Y.), v. 42 (January/February 1995) p. 74-9.