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About a year ago in a Typophile thread, in response to Hrant's advocacy for a science-based, theoretically-driven approach to legibility, I argued that legibility was a practical matter really, and that any typeface could be turned into a text type, without benefit of science or theory. He suggested I try my own Eunoia.
Sorry for the delay. It hasn't taken that long to do, just finding the time and motivation has delayed it.
Here is a pdf comparing Eunoia Text with Eunoia, Helvetica Medium Condensed, Univers 57, and ITC Franklin Gothic Book Condensed.
I've shown the face 8/9 justified, in a newspaper column format. I don't think this is a book face, as Hrant would probably prefer, but the challenge was to make a text face, and the news setting is a good test of that, and certainly qualifies as immersive reading.
I could have taken it further, but that would have departed from the type design, which is necessarily high contrast and condensed.
I would have liked to have shown it compared with faces that also have this quality, such as Britannic or Ocean, but I don't have anything like that.
Have I proved my point?
14 Nov 2008 — 7:38am
Loops on bold fonts now form lots of words for books.
but srlsy, i'm going start using 'plus' instead of 'and' when i speak (using all u sounds).
14 Nov 2008 — 12:07pm
I reminded Nick's statement (and I quite agreed, but I have to read in full all there, especially John Hudson's reflections).
And I was going to ask precisely the same thing: please Nick, offer a new PDF with the setting!
18 Dec 2009 — 6:36am
{I have removed this post because Nick has forbade me from participating in threads he has started. Continued: http://typophile.com/node/65216 - 12/17/09}
18 Dec 2009 — 4:53am
.
18 Dec 2009 — 8:55am
Thanks, Hrant.
forbade
IIRC the abstinence was Hrant's idea.
18 Dec 2009 — 12:33pm
Some of the better reading I have had here in a while. I love a good are vs. science debate. In these materials x-height, character count, letter-spacing and hyphenation are confounded. It is not possible to determine "legibility" until first define what that means, select dependent variables, generate a testable hypothesis, develop additional materials, select a sample population and generate a balanced experimental design.
18 Dec 2009 — 1:36pm
I'm not getting it.
"The sample I showed would be suitable for a magazine sidebar."
What kind of magazine?