Typophile - Type Designers Boycotting OS X!? - Comments

those lads might want to

will powers — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:53:21 -0800

those lads might want to take those laptops off their laps:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2004/dec/09/health.medicineandhealt...

powers

Is anyone else ever

James Puckett — Sun, 9 Dec 2007 14:34:54 -0800

Is anyone else ever surprised that all the Macs in design schools don’t get mixed up when students are coming and going? Of course, that might be because design students only look up from the screen for important guest lecturers.

Sii, we can’t get iPhones

dan_reynolds — Sun, 9 Dec 2007 12:45:26 -0800

Sii, we can’t get iPhones because they come with two-contracts, and we’re just here for one year :(

That picture is so obviously

sii — Sun, 9 Dec 2007 12:19:38 -0800

That picture is so obviously a fake - notice the mobile phone - it’s not an iPhone. Nice try thouugh Ralf.

Cheers, Si

I think, for those of us who

dezcom — Sun, 9 Dec 2007 10:35:29 -0800

I think, for those of us who have tried to produce type that is functional for both platforms, we have no choice but to venture forth accross the abyss to the “other platform” in attempt to be fair about testing. I wish I could afford a new Mac that allows switch-hitting. There will always be little annoying things creep in when any OS is reworked so we will always have a need for testing the computer foreign to us, whichever that may be.

ChrisL

Some would call that

dezcom — Sun, 9 Dec 2007 10:29:28 -0800

Some would call that “co-habitation” :-)

ChrisL

No. I’ll be installing

dan_reynolds — Sun, 9 Dec 2007 09:43:22 -0800

No. I’ll be installing Windows on a partition of my macbook. That’s like having an affair, not a divorce or a conversion. You could drop me into that photo above, and no one’d even know about my Windows dalliance.

An 11th student is on a

paul d hunt — Sun, 9 Dec 2007 09:25:15 -0800

An 11th student is on a Windows PC, but seems to be teetering on the edge of conversion!

i wouldn’t call it conversion. i’m just afraid that mac support of OT is so buggy that i can’t just rely on it to work (like it does in windows) without testing some basic scenarios. could i say you’re coverting to PC if you’re installing windows to build, set, test your Indic? >^p

I always use whatever font

Nick Shinn — Sun, 9 Dec 2007 09:15:35 -0800

I always use whatever font I’m working on as my Safari font, so that I’m reading it at whatever websites I browse that allow visitors the option of making their own font choices.

Just like deity Slimbach, seeing the world in his image everywhere he looks.

Just to tie into what Ralf

dan_reynolds — Sun, 9 Dec 2007 09:13:16 -0800

Just to tie into what Ralf posted, in the current MATD course at Reading (three of whom can be seen in the photo with Gerry), ten of the twelve of us use Apple laptops, each running system 10+. An 11th student is on a Windows PC, but seems to be teetering on the edge of conversion! And the 12th is running some sort of Linux thing. The Typography department’s computers are also Macs, and the little application we install to print only works with OS X.

I wonder what the Hague’s set-up looks like? I suspect they have at least a few Macs. So, if this is any indicator, I don’t think many type designers out there are boycotting OS X. At the ATypI conference in Brighton last September, there certainly were PCs, but really quite a lot of shiny macs as well.

Maybe I’m hopelessly naive

pattyfab — Sun, 9 Dec 2007 08:54:39 -0800

Maybe I’m hopelessly naive and I am also a graphic designer NOT a type designer, but wouldn’t it behoove type designers to at least test out their fonts on the Mac OS? Given that most graphic designers use Macs and we represent the bulk of the font-buyers—at least of boutique fonts as opposed to the ones that come with the OS or in large Adobe packages. There are probably some talented graphic designers using windows somewhere out there, but I doubt they’d get much work (at least in NYC). This business is heavily Mac-dominant here. Again I know next to nothing about font creation, merely about font usage.

Type designers like

Ralf Herrmann — Sun, 9 Dec 2007 08:12:31 -0800

Type designers like apple:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wasianed/2097101599/

At least in Reading.

”...he sounded like a

dberlow — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 05:10:14 -0700

”...he sounded like a programmer with an interest in type rather than a type designer, because everything he was concerned about were issues of rendering, interpolation algorithms, pixel grid fitting...”

Sounds to me like an interest in screen fonts ;-) The poll will show that most people Here use Mac OSX.
What the poll will not likely show is where they expect the “fonts” they produce to qualitatively peak.

“I liked Microsoft’s rendering better than Apple’s the last time I did a head-to-head...”
Thomas, I assume this also means you like MS rendering better than Adobe’s ;?

Cheers!

Speaking as part of the

Thomas Phinney — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 21:19:29 -0700

Speaking as part of the Windows-using minority, I’m clear that the majority of professional type design today is done on Mac OS. There is a substantial minority on Windows, though. I can’t say whether the Mac percentage is 60 or 75, but I’d say it’s somewhere in that range.

The reasons I’m on Windows are mostly, but not entirely, unrelated to type design:

- new beta versions of FontLab come out on Windows a long time before the equivalent Mac version. (The time gap is a lot smaller if you’re waiting for the official release, though.)

- Adobe has a bunch of internal business processes that are Windows-centric

- Outlook sucks less than Entourage.

- when I switched from mac to Windows for my main machine, OS X had just come out and was not really ready for prime time, plus you couldn’t get a Mac laptop with 1200 pixels of vertical resolution on its LCD screen. Both of these factors are no longer true, however.

Note that you won’t see rasterization differences on my list of why I’m on Windows! Yes, I liked Microsoft’s rendering better than Apple’s the last time I did a head-to-head comparison (which was not recent). But most of my testing and work is in Adobe applications, which use Adobe’s rendering, regardless of platform. So it’s not a big issue.

Cheers,

Time for a poll!

Stephen Coles — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 20:20:00 -0700

Time for a poll!

Type Designers Boycotting OS X!?

nmerriam — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 22:36:12 -0700

I just had a fascinating discussion with someone who claimed no type designers use OS X (for a variety of technical reasons), which absolutely blew my mind. I know for a fact Ed Benguiat uses a Mac since I studied under him at SVA, and I’m (perhaps erroneously) assuming that most Mac users are currently using FontLab Studio under OS X.

Can anyone with first-hand knowledge talk about what systems are used by the folks at Adobe, Linotype, ITC, etc?

I’m not looking to start a platform war/discussion, it just amazed me that anyone thought it would make much difference which system type was digitized on, since most designers I know of work on paper first and then use Fontlab software (whether FontLab Studio or Fontographer) that is cross-platform. But it did get me curious if there was some sort of massive systems change that took place since I left NYC and stopped doing things with the Type Director’s Club.

I know occasionally we have discussion on the more technical nature of digital type here, but most type designers I’ve known haven’t spent much time worrying about the algorithms or technology behind any particular system, so long as they got good results out of it when the file was sent to the imagesetter.