Since the default settings for type are usually terrible, the result is a serious degradation of communication. This is the inherent problem of the Internet, with its basis in HTML: The words look different to each reader, depending on the kind of screen they’re using and the browser settings they’ve chosen (or not bothered to change).
The Typography of Text: One is that, as I’ve said, the way words look has a huge effect on how well they communicate. There are two things wrong with this concept. What the characters actually look like at the other end depends on outside factors such as choice of font and size and spacing-matters of “style” that can be applied to the content as easily as you might slip on a jacket or a different pair of shoes. We can transmit this string of digits (as e-mail, for instance) and then reassemble it and read it. One of the strengths of computers is that you can do this, to a point: You can turn a sentence into a string of ones and zeroes that represent particular characters in the alphabet, along with a handful of other characters such as commas and periods. The assumption behind the idea of “plain text” is that you can somehow separate words from what they look like, turning them into pure content. The subtleties of typography, of which 99 out of 100 people are completely unaware, make the difference between words that those 99 people will want to read and words that they’ll skip over. The content-the words-always takes some form, and even if we pay no conscious attention to the presentation, that form has its influence. There’s no way, in fact, to separate content from form. But no matter which kind of information is more important to us, we receive various kinds of input all at once, and they’re inextricably linked. 
A few of us even think both ways at once. Some of us think verbally we absorb information best from hearing or reading words. Some of us think visually we learn best from images. ContentĪs educators know very well, everybody learns differently. And the myth of plain text has done a lot of harm to our ability to communicate on the Internet. We’ve all heard the cry: “Just give me plain text!” But there’s no such thing. You can find more from John at his website.
#STRINGS THEORY FONT DOWNLOAD#
If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.Įventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. Dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D.
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