Since I also work on font rendering technology, having recently developed FontFocus, I have passionate opinions about the way fonts rendered into pixels should look. Stephen Coles asked me to review these fonts for Typographica. Microsoft’s dominant market position ensures that a huge fraction of the letters projected onto eyeballs in the next decade will be renderings of these fonts. These fonts will be bundled with the upcoming Longhorn operating system, scheduled to ship in late 2006. Microsoft has sensed this need and has responded by commissioning a suite of six fonts optimized for ClearType. The time is right for new fonts carefully crafted for reading on today’s screens, and those of the next few years.

Even so, most of the fonts people read on-screen are either holdovers from pre-digital print, or screen fonts excellently tuned for last year’s displays. Fortunately, the screens are a lot better (and still improving), and innovations such as Microsoft’s ClearType are pushing the envelope of rendering technology. A lot of people spend a lot of time reading from computer screens. The screens and rendering technology just couldn’t do it. The type on the screen would of course be coarser, and there was no hope whatsoever of faithfully reproducing the subtleties of spacing. The promise of “what you see is what you get” was really based on a little white lie. Until recently, the most carefully designed type on computer screens was simply a placeholder for the final printed version. The first five hundred years of typography (as opposed to calligraphy) were all about the printed page.

Microsoft’s ClearType Font Collection: A Fair and Balanced Review

Corbel font kit