This story actually links to Typophile, so you can get that here:
http://typophile.com/node/58935

Right the first comment at http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/12/font-bureau-takes-credit-for-palms-cu... -- "the uppercase I and the lowercase l still look the same. Why the hell do people do this with sans-serif fonts?"

Amazing how well propaganda works. Whom do I need to congratulate?

Ouch.

> “the uppercase I and the lowercase l still look the same.
> Why the hell do people do this with sans-serif fonts?”

david, do you have anything to say for yourself?

because this bugs the shit out of a lot of people.

-bowerbird

Is Johnston's Underground the first sans with a tailed l?

I come from Illinois, and the abbreviations Il or Ill. are often awkward in sans faces. But honestly aside from that, I don't recall ever having a problem when both the I and l are straight. Maybe in other languages... The straight sided also save space, and maybe that demand trumped disambiguation here.

...because this bugs the shit out of a lot of people.

Not me. I admire his reticence.

Nice time-line from Nick.

<-shutting off nick's excessive emphasis...

***

nick said:
> Not me. I admire his reticence.

it's not "his reticence" that bugs people.

it's the too-highly-similar uppercase-i and lowercase-l.
(and no, it doesn't help if they're not _exactly_identical_.)

so i just wondered if david had anything to say about it.

-bowerbird

It's really unfortunate that the blogger on Engadget used a pre-release mockup of the Pre interface for his post -- which actually does show Avenir, not Prelude! (cf. here)

I think DB is currently traveling, so as semi-official FB apologist, I'll offer some additional information in his place.

David actually did design an alternate I and 1 in Prelude. They're right there in the fonts:

(Defaults above, alternates below.)

I suppose the final usage may have been up to Palm.

> Ascender Corporation was also integrally involved in the project though with was not mentioned in our release.

Yeah, that would be my fault. I tried to make up for it in some small way here.

Theory, based on precedent, could not have accounted for the success of The Mix.
And by that I mean not just popularity, but successful functioning, i.e. readability.

I think there's a lot more design space available for the judicious positioning of serifs, in both some-serif, semi-serif, and serifed types. Try it, and see what works.

Another thing you can do is loopy "g"s!

William: But honestly aside from that, I don’t recall ever having a problem when both the I and l are straight.

Fontlab glyph names? Is that Iacute or lacute? In a sans font with a sans ui, I've grabbed the wrong glyph before.

bowerbird: dissent is great, parameterized dissent is best.

Cheers!

Quite. I must say that whenever I have to email corrections to our typesetters, the moment any of the changes involves l/I/1, I select the entire email and change it to Georgia.

(If anyone knows how to make Outlook 2003 do rich-text emails in Georgia by default instead of Arial I'd be grateful to learn it!)
________________________________________________
Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster's stopped working.

Duh. Thanks for that si; should've worked that out for myself. Sorry for drifting off-topic there folks

> bowerbird: dissent is great, parameterized dissent is best.

well david, i thought the parameter was clear here:
when two letters look highly similar, it's confusing.

-bowerbird

>when two letters look highly similar, it’s confusing.

Yes, I am aware of that effect. Yet... 90% of all sans share a lack of the features of which we speak, and... they've lasted in the market for sometimes a century. Is something else happening too?

Cheers!

david said:
> Is something else happening too?

yes. the people who design and run things are out-of-touch,
and fail to listen when the dissent bubbles up from the trenches,
so we groundlings must muddle through the mess they've made,
and make to this very day because "we've always done it that way".

for instance, here's what ed colligan, the head of palm, said in 2006,
when he was asked to comment on the upcoming debut of the iphone:
> “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out
> how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just
> figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

that seems unbelieveably pigheaded and naive in retrospect, not?

oh well, at least unlike the financial shitheads, you font-makers
are not extracting massive tons of money out of the economy, or
-- once your house of cards has fallen apart -- insisting that you
need to continue receiving your obscenely-huge year-end bonuses.

so, as "experts" go, you're relatively benign... ;+)

-bowerbird

p.s. of course, when global-warming chickens come home to roost,
that's gonna make the recent financial collapse look like peanuts...

I was prepared to turn this job down when the VP of engineering sent me an email. He responded that this was not going to be like Windows or the Mac. I was skeptical, so I ticked off a list of capabilities that I felt were required in any model modern device, desktops included, to make me (users) happy. (I ticked off exactly the same list here sometime ago to dead silence). This client though, he said "We can do that... all of it!" The Pre is typographically for real: it uses TT, it scales according to code, it's got a sweet rendering, OT is supported and feature acceptance expanding, 180 dpi!, integer metrics, font fidelity and open.

I hear what's being asked of the some-serif, and will endeavor to please, thank you.

Read on! Hug a Tree!

Cheers!

>He responded that this was not going to be like Windows or the Mac.

That's exactly what struck me when I first saw the interface (before knowing David and Tom were involved) when looking at videos and static shots like these was that with good interface design, and a high-res display, the need for font tricks like cap I, and ClearType is diminished. Not sure the Pre is there yet, but seems to be headed in the right direction.

PS. What surprised me was lack of sub-pixel positioning in the browser. But that could be a webkit / perf trade-off.

Eventually somebody is going to mention that, like Segoe by Microsoft, Prelude is merely a clone of Avenir.

And then someone else will mention that Avenir is merely a clone of Nobel.

But Nobel wasn’t what they were cloning. When your daughter dresses up like Jessica Simpson, she isn’t cloning Eve.

—
Joe Clark
http://joeclark.org/

Actually the Starling 'ultra', now the featured face, has old style stress, like the regular, whereas Times Bold has 'modern' vertical stress. Of course Mike Parker says its the original, and Times the copy. I wonder what all the differences are...

If he does then David can send him his.

>Do Avenir and Frutiger look alike to you, Joe? :)

I've seen the secret Linotype roadmap - next year they ship Frutenir - then year after next it's Frutenir Next.