Reading Type

Reading Type

   We all have our own style of reading, some of us reading much more quickly than others.  Both my wife and my brother can plow through a book in 2-3 days, and do this day after day.  As for me, my pace is a bit slower, taking about 10 days or so, spending about 15 minutes each night before dozing off (the days are saved for magazine articles).  And of course, there is the great divide, fiction or non-fiction;  and while I prefer the latter, I find some fiction particularly interesting, able to capture my imagination and send me swirling into an entirely imaginary world, be it one of this life or one totally different in time or space (Donna Tart's Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Goldfinch, was one of these).  But overall, with my slower, savoring pace of reading (and sometimes such books take me much, much longer, because I really don't want them to end), I tend to gravitate away from reading so quickly, even as I acknowledge that the amount of well-written material is building around me like a bacterial strain gone wild.

   This was frustratingly evident in The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe, in which both he and his mother (who is the one in the hospital) speed through books as they discuss them, slowly building a long-lasting rapport as they recognize their differences, not only in their reviews and interpretations, but in their relationship to one another.  Might I add how frustrating it was to realize that I only recognized ONE of the books they discussed, as if being a latecomer to a speed-reading book club and having to catch up.

   All of which brings me, rather slowly I admit (along the lines of the well-done-but-slow-to-get-there HBO series, True Detective, which I bring up because clustered among all the reading are the video series and documentaries and TED talks that also ask for your time, each possibly as worthy as the book one holds in one's hand) to the ongoing battle over fonts and reading types, not only electronically (as in Kindle-type e-readers) but in something as simple as what you read, from subtitles to newspapers to books (have you noticed how many non-U.S. films use yellow for their subtitles, the U.S. primarily using the color white).  One of the largest breakthroughs in a new font design was in the phone directory and the revised typeface, Bell Centennial.  And this would preclude designing the typeface for symbols...currency signs such as the Euro or dollar or Yen or road signs such as the universal stick human in all sorts of poses.  When facing billions of possible readers (and computer recognition programs), the studies of font design go much further than imagined (just peek at the hundreds of fonts available on a standard word processing program such as Microsoft Word).

   So perhaps you haven't paid much attention to fonts, since they are what they are.  But in the outside world of design, much is happening.  On the computer coding end, a virtual battle has begun and in an article in Bloomberg Businessweek, the separation is happening between fonts designed for reading and fonts designed for writing, and they are substantially different.  In one particular case, the change is primarily over symmetry, since most reading fonts are spaced evenly.  For computer programmers and coders, however,  this makes spotting errors difficult, especially is every word (including punctuation) occupies the same space.  To get a better idea of this, imagine that you're a writer proofreading your manuscript;  errors such as misspelled words might be caught by a spellchecker program, but not those of missed spaces or incorrect punctuation (and advanced apologies if I've missed such errors in my posts).  According to the article, one program called Input has 168 styles, including five distinct "i's" and "l's."  Says its creator, David Jonathan Ross, punctuation "sticks out like a sore thumb.  If you set a novel in Input, the punctuation would be distracting.  But in code it's a better balance because you're not reading as much as scanning."  One other writing app (yes, many of these new fonts are used by authors) has sold over a million downloads (at $4.99 each).

   On the reading front, the battle over font design only escalates further, one lawsuit now approaching $20 million, this between two partners who are credited with, "typefaces that rendered the stock charts in the Wall Street Journal readable and helped Martha Stewart sell cookbooks,"  said the article in Bloomberg Businessweek (which is worth reading if only to see how delicate such font changes and designs are, some designs taking over 2 years to create). "Their lettering was used on the engraving of the cornerstone of the World Trade Center's Freedom Tower.  Last year the duo won the AIGA Medal, the profession's highest award."
   
   Read the very back page of a book and you'll see what typeface was used in setting the book, a notation nearly every publisher proudly includes.  And when you do so, you might be surprised at how different publishers can be, each feeling that their particular chosen typeface was the one that would prove easier on your eyes...this also happens when magazines decide to make a radical change in their appearance, changing the layout and fonts in an effort to "modernize" or bring you, the reader, a "cleaner" copy).  And the changes can be small, the whisp of a "leg" decorating a "T" or a teardrop coming off of the top of a "C."  Some font designers even hide their changes (the subject of the quite enjoyable quasi-fantasy journey into Google and Harry Potter, the book, Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore.

   For writers, bloggers, app designers and readers, the changes are happening before our eyes (royalties from font design are lucrative and perpetual, much as with song royalties, so there are many designers trying to get into the market).  Some changes might be barely visible (the goal of the font designer) but valuable to a company (which will easily pay an average of $299 just to use the font).  Imagine not only enjoying a book but finishing it and your eyes are rested.  New studies are bringing scientists into the fold, what does and doesn't tire our eyes and our brains during reading or staring at a screen.

    Soon, the question, "what's your type?," might have an entirely new meaning.