- From: Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2010 20:13:42 -0700
- To: Thomas Phinney <tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu>
- Cc: "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com>, John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com>, Sergey Malkin <sergeym@microsoft.com>, John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>, Sylvain Galineau <sylvaing@microsoft.com>, www-style@w3.org, www-font <www-font@w3.org>
On Sep 13, 2010, at 5:56 PM, Thomas Phinney wrote: > Um, yeah, there is. "I don't care whose fonts they are; as a designer, I don't want to see fake bolds and/or fake italics showing up by accident in my work." This is a pretty darn common position among serious graphic designers, which is why the behavior in Adobe applications is the way it is. (It happens to be a position I share, but that's not the point.) I doubt that is anywhere near a majority position. As much as I would prefer all typography to be beautiful, at the end of the day it is more important that my bold text is actually bolder than my non-bold text. Bolding or italicizing words in a paragraph is done for a communicative purpose; it generally not just there for typographers to stand back and admire. I say this as both a graphic designer and Web author. All design is about compromise in the face of varying priorities, but rarely would the need for perfect letterforms more important than adding emphasis of strength to words through italics (or obliques) and bolding. I don't consider the decrease in readability due to synthesizing bold and italic to be significant enough to warrant sacrificing bold and italic altogether.
Received on Tuesday, 14 September 2010 03:14:19 UTC