Type is something we consume in enormous quantities. In much of the world, it's completely inescapable. But few consumers are concerned to know where a particular typeface came from or when or who designed it, if, indeed, there was any human agency involved in its creation, if it didn't just sort of materialize out of the software ether.
字体是我们 大量使用的东西。 从很大程度上, 字体完全不可避免。 但是很少有用户关心 某种字体是哪儿来的 或什么时候、谁设计的, 是否真有人力融入了字体的创造, 它是否只是 由软件凭空产生的。
But I do have to be concerned with those things. It's my job. I'm one of the tiny handful of people who gets badly bent out of shape by the bad spacing of the T and the E that you see there. I've got to take that slide off. I can't stand it. Nor can Chris. There. Good.
但我却不得不关心这些问题。 这是我的工作。 我是这一小部分人之一, 会对T和e之间错误的间距 大发雷霆, 就像你们这里看到的。 我不得不换下那张幻灯片。 我受不了,Chris也是。 行了。好的。
So my talk is about the connection between technology and design of type. The technology has changed a number of times since I started work: photo, digital, desktop, screen, web. I've had to survive those changes and try to understand their implications for what I do for design. This slide is about the effect of tools on form. The two letters, the two K's, the one on your left, my right, is modern, made on a computer. All straight lines are dead straight. The curves have that kind of mathematical smoothness that the Bézier formula imposes. On the right, ancient Gothic, cut in the resistant material of steel by hand. None of the straight lines are actually straight. The curves are kind of subtle. It has that spark of life from the human hand that the machine or the program can never capture. What a contrast.
所以我的演讲是有关 技术和字体设计之间的联系。 自我工作以来 技术已变化了多次: 照排,数码,桌面,屏幕和网络。 我已不得不适应这些变化, 并设法理解它们对 我的设计工作所产生的影响。 这张幻灯片是有关工具对形式的影响。 这两个字母,这两个K, 在你们的左边我的右边的,是现代的, 用计算机设计出来的。 所有的直线都是笔直的。 曲线具有用贝塞尔公式施加出来 的数学平滑。 右边,古老的哥特式的, 是从耐磨的钢材手工切割出来的。 没有一条直线实际上是直的。 曲线有点微妙。 它具有来自人手的生命火花, 这是机器或程序 永远也扑捉不到的。 多么鲜明的对比。
Well, I tell a lie. A lie at TED. I'm really sorry. Both of these were made on a computer, same software, same Bézier curves, same font format. The one on your left was made by Zuzana Licko at Emigre, and I did the other one. The tool is the same, yet the letters are different. The letters are different because the designers are different. That's all. Zuzana wanted hers to look like that. I wanted mine to look like that. End of story. Type is very adaptable. Unlike a fine art, such as sculpture or architecture, type hides its methods. I think of myself as an industrial designer. The thing I design is manufactured, and it has a function: to be read, to convey meaning. But there is a bit more to it than that. There's the sort of aesthetic element. What makes these two letters different from different interpretations by different designers? What gives the work of some designers sort of characteristic personal style, as you might find in the work of a fashion designer, an automobile designer, whatever?
好吧,我撒了个谎。 在TED撒了个谎。我真的很抱歉。 这两个都是电脑做出来的, 同样的软件,同样的贝塞尔曲线, 同样的字体格式。 你们左边的这个 是由Emigre公司的Zuzana Licko制作的, 另一个是我制作的。 工具是一样的,但字母是不同的。 字母不同 是因为设计者不同。 就这些。Zuzana希望她设计的东西看起来那样。 我希望我的看起来这样。仅此而已。 字体有很强的适应性。 不像雕塑或建筑这样的艺术, 字体使人看不出它的制作方法。 我把自己看成是工业设计师。 我设计的东西被制造, 而且它有功能: 可读并表达意思。 除此之外还有更多的含义。 有点儿美学的成份。 是什么使这两个字母由于 不同的设计者有不同的解释呢? 是什么使某些设计者的工作 有着特有的个人风格, 像你在时装设计师 或汽车设计师的作品中发现的一样?
There have been some cases, I admit, where I as a designer did feel the influence of technology. This is from the mid-'60s, the change from metal type to photo, hot to cold. This brought some benefits but also one particular drawback: a spacing system that only provided 18 discrete units for letters to be accommodated on. I was asked at this time to design a series of condensed sans serif types with as many different variants as possible within this 18-unit box. Quickly looking at the arithmetic, I realized I could only actually make three of related design. Here you see them. In Helvetica Compressed, Extra Compressed, and Ultra Compressed, this rigid 18-unit system really boxed me in. It kind of determined the proportions of the design. Here are the typefaces, at least the lower cases. So do you look at these and say, "Poor Matthew, he had to submit to a problem, and by God it shows in the results." I hope not. If I were doing this same job today, instead of having 18 spacing units, I would have 1,000. Clearly I could make more variants, but would these three members of the family be better? It's hard to say without actually doing it, but they would not be better in the proportion of 1,000 to 18, I can tell you that. My instinct tells you that any improvement would be rather slight, because they were designed as functions of the system they were designed to fit, and as I said, type is very adaptable. It does hide its methods. All industrial designers work within constraints. This is not fine art.
我承认,在有些情况下, 我作为一名设计师 确实感到技术的影响。 这来自六十年代中期, 从铅字变成照相排版, 从热到凉。 这既带来益处 但也有一个特别的缺点: 它的间距体系只提供了 18个离散的单元 来容纳字母。 当时我被要求设计 一系列紧凑的无衬线字体, 在18个单元之内 带有尽可能多的字体变化。 快速地看了一下算术, 我意识到实际只能进行三个相关设计。 这里你们看到了, Helvetica压缩,额外压缩,和超压缩三种字体。 这种严格的18 单元系统 真把我限制住了。 它某种程度上决定了 设计的比例。 这里是这些字体的小写部分。 所以你是否会看着这些说, “可怜的马修不得不屈从于这一难题, 天哪,结果显而易见。” 我希望不是这样。 如果我今天还做同样的工作, 我会有1000个间距单元, 而不是有18个单元。 显然我能制出更多的字体变化, 但这一系列的三种字体会更好吗? 没有实际做过很难说, 但我可以告诉你们 不会有1000比18倍这么好。 我的直觉是, 任何改进都会是很轻微的, 因为它们是根据系统的需要而设计的功能, 像我说的那样,字体适应性很强。 确实让人看不出它的设计方法。 所有工业设计师的工作都有局限性。 这不是艺术。
The question is, does a constraint force a compromise? By accepting a constraint, are you working to a lower standard? I don't believe so, and I've always been encouraged by something that Charles Eames said. He said he was conscious of working within constraints, but not of making compromises. The distinction between a constraint and a compromise is obviously very subtle, but it's very central to my attitude to work.
问题是,是否局限性 会迫使妥协? 接受局限性 你就降低工作标准了吗? 我不相信,而且我总是被 Charles Eames所说的话激励着。 他说他意识到 工作有局限性, 但不是进行妥协。 局限性和妥协之间的区别 显然是很微妙的, 但对我的工作态度确实是很重要的。
Remember this reading experience? The phone book. I'll hold the slide so you can enjoy the nostalgia. This is from the mid-'70s early trials of Bell Centennial typeface I designed for the U.S. phone books, and it was my first experience of digital type, and quite a baptism. Designed for the phone books, as I said, to be printed at tiny size on newsprint on very high-speed rotary presses with ink that was kerosene and lampblack. This is not a hospitable environment for a typographic designer. So the challenge for me was to design type that performed as well as possible in these very adverse production conditions. As I say, we were in the infancy of digital type. I had to draw every character by hand on quadrille graph paper -- there were four weights of Bell Centennial — pixel by pixel, then encode them raster line by raster line for the keyboard. It took two years, but I learned a lot. These letters look as though they've been chewed by the dog or something or other, but the missing pixels at the intersections of strokes or in the crotches are the result of my studying the effects of ink spread on cheap paper and reacting, revising the font accordingly. These strange artifacts are designed to compensate for the undesirable effects of scale and production process. At the outset, AT&T had wanted to set the phone books in Helvetica, but as my friend Erik Spiekermann said in the Helvetica movie, if you've seen that, the letters in Helvetica were designed to be as similar to one another as possible. This is not the recipe for legibility at small size. It looks very elegant up on a slide. I had to disambiguate these forms of the figures as much as possible in Bell Centennial by sort of opening the shapes up, as you can see in the bottom part of that slide.
记得这种阅读体验吧? 电话簿。我留住这张幻灯片, 你们可以怀旧一下。 这来自70年代中期 我为美国电话簿设计的 Bell Centennial字体的早期尝试, 这也是我第一次用数码字体, 相当于一次洗礼。 像我所说的那样,为电话簿而设计, 以极小的尺寸打印在新闻纸上, 用的是非常高速的轮转印刷机, 以及煤油和灯黑制成的油墨。 对字体设计师来说 这不是一个好的环境。 所以对我的挑战是 在这些非常不利的条件下, 尽可能地把字体设计好。 如我所说,我们处在数码字体的婴儿期。 我不得不在方格坐标图纸上 手工绘制每一个字符。 Bell Centennial字体有四种粗细。 先一个像素一个像素地绘制, 再用键盘对其逐行编码。 我花了两年时间,但学了很多。 这些字母看上去像 被狗或别的什么东西嚼过, 但在笔画的交点处或岔口处 缺失的像素, 是我研究了 油墨在廉价纸上扩散和反应的效果, 从而相应修改字体的结果。 这些奇怪的人为的缺陷被设计于用来弥补 大规模生产过程中所带来的 不良影响。 起初,AT&T公司想 在电话簿中用Helvetica字体, 但正如我朋友Erik Spiekermann 在电影《传奇字体》中所说,如果你看过的话, Helvetica字体的字母被设计得 彼此尽可能相似。 这不是看清小尺寸字体的良方。 它在幻灯片上看起来非常优雅。 我必须尽可能拆开 Bell Centennial字体的形状 来给这些数字形式消除歧义, 就像你在这张幻灯片底部看到的那样。
So now we're on to the mid-'80s, the early days of digital outline fonts, vector technology. There was an issue at that time with the size of the fonts, the amount of data that was required to find and store a font in computer memory. It limited the number of fonts you could get on your typesetting system at any one time. I did an analysis of the data, and found that a typical serif face you see on the left needed nearly twice as much data as a sans serif in the middle because of all the points required to define the elegantly curved serif brackets. The numbers at the bottom of the slide, by the way, they represent the amount of data needed to store each of the fonts. So the sans serif, in the middle, sans the serifs, was much more economical, 81 to 151.
现在我们看到的是80年代中期, 数码轮廓字体的初期, 矢量技术。 当时的一个问题在于 字体的大小, 在计算机内存中搜寻和存储一种字体 所需的数据量。 这个问题限制了 排版系统同时可用的字体数量。 我进行了数据分析, 发现一种典型的衬线字体, 如你们左边看到的, 比中间的无衬线字体 要多近两倍的数据, 因为需要很多的点才能 给出衬线与主体之间优雅而弯曲的过渡。 顺便提一下,幻灯片底部的数字 代表存储每一种字体 所需的数据量。 因此中间的无衬线字体 是更经济的, 81相比于151。
"Aha," I thought. "The engineers have a problem. Designer to the rescue."
我想,“哈,工程师们有麻烦了。 设计师来救援。”
I made a serif type, you can see it on the right, without curved serifs. I made them polygonal, out of straight line segments, chamfered brackets. And look, as economical in data as a sans serif. We call it Charter, on the right.
我设计了一种衬线字体,你们可以在右边看到, 没有弯曲的衬线。 我把它们用直线段制成多角形的 斜切的过渡。 看,数据量上和无衬线字体一样经济。 我们把右边的命名为Charter字体。
So I went to the head of engineering with my numbers, and I said proudly, "I have solved your problem."
所以我带着我的数字找到工程部主管, 自豪地说: “我解决了你们的问题。”
"Oh," he said. "What problem?"
“噢?” 他说, “什么问题?”
And I said, "Well, you know, the problem of the huge data you require for serif fonts and so on."
我说:“你知道, 衬线字体等要求大量数据的问题。“
"Oh," he said. "We solved that problem last week. We wrote a compaction routine that reduces the size of all fonts by an order of magnitude. You can have as many fonts on your system as you like."
“噢,” 他说,”我们上周解决了那个问题。 我们写了一个压缩程序 把所有字体的大小都缩小了一个数量级。 你想要多少字体, 你的系统就可以有多少。“
"Well, thank you for letting me know," I said.
我说:“谢谢你告诉我。“
Foiled again. I was left with a design solution for a nonexistent technical problem.
再次受打击。 留给我的是 为了一个不存在的技术问题而设计的一个解决方案。
But here is where the story sort of gets interesting for me. I didn't just throw my design away in a fit of pique. I persevered. What had started as a technical exercise became an aesthetic exercise, really. In other words, I had come to like this typeface. Forget its origins. Screw that. I liked the design for its own sake. The simplified forms of Charter gave it a sort of plain-spoken quality and unfussy spareness that sort of pleased me. You know, at times of technical innovation, designers want to be influenced by what's in the air. We want to respond. We want to be pushed into exploring something new. So Charter is a sort of parable for me, really. In the end, there was no hard and fast causal link between the technology and the design of Charter. I had really misunderstood the technology. The technology did suggest something to me, but it did not force my hand, and I think this happens very often.
但这里是这个故事让我感兴趣的地方。 我并没有赌气 扔掉我的设计。 我继续坚持做下去。 作为技术练习开始的作品, 变成了美学练习,真的。 换句话说,我渐渐开始喜欢这种字体。 忘掉初衷。别管它。 我喜欢这个设计本身。 Charter字体的简化的形式 使它具有某种直言不讳的质量, 简洁而开阔, 这有点令我高兴。 要知道,在技术创新的时代, 设计师们希望受到 当时环境的影响。 我们想要回应。 我们想要被迫去探索新的东西。 因此Charter字体对我来说真有点象个寓言。 最后,在技术和Charter字体的设计之间 没有硬性的因果联系。 我确实是误解了技术。 技术确实向我提出了些什么, 但并没有强迫我, 我想这种情况时常发生。
You know, engineers are very smart, and despite occasional frustrations because I'm less smart, I've always enjoyed working with them and learning from them. Apropos, in the mid-'90s, I started talking to Microsoft about screen fonts. Up to that point, all the fonts on screen had been adapted from previously existing printing fonts, of course. But Microsoft foresaw correctly the movement, the stampede towards electronic communication, to reading and writing onscreen with the printed output as being sort of secondary in importance.
要知道,工程师们非常聪明, 尽管偶尔受挫折, 因为我不够聪明, 我总喜欢和他们一起工作 并向他们学习。 恰好在90年代中期, 我开始向微软 谈起屏幕字体。 当时,屏幕上的所有字体 都由先前已有的印刷字体 改编而来。 但微软正确地预见到了 这个潮流, 电子通信的热潮, 在屏幕上进行读写的趋势, 而打印输出成为了次要的。
So the priorities were just tipping at that point. They wanted a small core set of fonts that were not adapted but designed for the screen to face up to the problems of screen, which were their coarse resolution displays. I said to Microsoft, a typeface designed for a particular technology is a self-obsoleting typeface. I've designed too many faces in the past that were intended to mitigate technical problems. Thanks to the engineers, the technical problems went away. So did my typeface. It was only a stopgap. Microsoft came back to say that affordable computer monitors with better resolutions were at least a decade away. So I thought, well, a decade, that's not bad, that's more than a stopgap.
这种优先级当时才露端倪。 他们想要的是一小组核心字体, 不是改编而来的, 而是专门针对屏幕的问题而设计的, 就是那些低分辨率的显示器。 我对微软说, 为某种特定的技术而设计的字体 是自我淘汰的字体。 过去我设计过太多字体 意在减轻技术问题。 多亏了工程师们,技术问题不存在了。 我的字体也不存在了。 这只是个临时措施。 微软回过来说 价格实惠的有着更好的分辨率的 电脑显示器 至少还要等十年。 所以,我想, 好吧,十年,不太坏, 不能算是个临时措施。
So I was persuaded, I was convinced, and we went to work on what became Verdana and Georgia, for the first time working not on paper but directly onto the screen from the pixel up. At that time, screens were binary. The pixel was either on or it was off. Here you see the outline of a letter, the cap H, which is the thin black line, the contour, which is how it is stored in memory, superimposed on the bitmap, which is the grey area, which is how it's displayed on the screen. The bitmap is rasterized from the outline. Here in a cap H, which is all straight lines, the two are in almost perfect sync on the Cartesian grid. Not so with an O. This looks more like bricklaying than type design, but believe me, this is a good bitmap O, for the simple reason that it's symmetrical in both x and y axes. In a binary bitmap, you actually can't ask for more than that. I would sometimes make, I don't know, three or four different versions of a difficult letter like a lowercase A, and then stand back to choose which was the best. Well, there was no best, so the designer's judgment comes in in trying to decide which is the least bad. Is that a compromise? Not to me, if you are working at the highest standard the technology will allow, although that standard may be well short of the ideal. You may be able to see on this slide two different bitmap fonts there. The "a" in the upper one, I think, is better than the "a" in the lower one, but it still ain't great. You can maybe see the effect better if it's reduced. Well, maybe not.
所以我被说服了, 我们着手工作, 做出了Verdana字体和Georgia字体, 第一次不是在纸上工作 而是直接从像素到屏幕。 当时,屏幕是二进制的。 像素或亮或灭。 这里你们看到字母的轮廓, 大写的H, 细黑线是它的轮廓, 这也是它在存储器里的样子, 叠加在点阵字体上, 即灰色区域, 这就是它在屏幕上显示的样子。 点阵字体是从轮廓点阵化而来的。 在大写的H里,全部都是直线, 在直角坐标网格上 两者近乎完美同步。 O可就不是这样啦。 这个看起来更像是砌砖而不是字体设计, 但相信我,这是一个好的点阵字体O, 原因很简单, 在X轴和Y轴上都是对称的。 在二进制的点阵字体里, 你实际上不能要求更多了。 我有时会为一个难字母 设计三个或四个版本, 像小写的a, 再退回去选出最好的一个。 其实没有最好的。 所以这里需要设计师的判断, 来设法决定 哪个是最不坏的。 这是一种妥协吗? 对我来说不是, 如果你是按技术所允许的最高标准来工作, 尽管这个标准 可能不够理想。 你或许能看到这张幻灯片上 有两个不同的点阵字体。 我觉得上方的“a” 比下方的“a”要好, 但仍不够优秀。 如果缩小它,你们或许能更好地看出这种效果。 也许看不出来。
So I'm a pragmatist, not an idealist, out of necessity. For a certain kind of temperament, there is a certain kind of satisfaction in doing something that cannot be perfect but can still be done to the best of your ability. Here's the lowercase H from Georgia Italic. The bitmap looks jagged and rough. It is jagged and rough. But I discovered, by experiment, that there is an optimum slant for an italic on a screen so the strokes break well at the pixel boundaries. Look in this example how, rough as it is, how the left and right legs actually break at the same level. That's a victory. That's good, right there. And of course, at the lower depths, you don't get much choice. This is an S, in case you were wondering.
所以,我是一个出于需要的实用主义者, 而不是一个理想主义者。 有些事情无法完美 但尽你所能仍可完成, 就某种气质而言, 做这些事情时存在一种满足感。 这是用Georgia斜体的小写h。 这个点阵看起来参差不齐,还粗糙。 它的确参差不齐和粗糙。 但我通过实验发现, 屏幕上的斜体 有一个最佳倾斜 以致笔画刚好 在像素边界断开。 看这个例子,多粗糙, 左腿和右腿 实际上怎样在同一水平分开。 那是个胜利。那很好,就是那儿。 当然在更低深度, 你就没有多少选择了。 这是S,万一你想知道。
Well, it's been 18 years now since Verdana and Georgia were released. Microsoft were absolutely right, it took a good 10 years, but screen displays now do have improved spatial resolution, and very much improved photometric resolution thanks to anti-aliasing and so on. So now that their mission is accomplished, has that meant the demise of the screen fonts that I designed for coarser displays back then? Will they outlive the now-obsolete screens and the flood of new web fonts coming on to the market? Or have they established their own sort of evolutionary niche that is independent of technology? In other words, have they been absorbed into the typographic mainstream? I'm not sure, but they've had a good run so far. Hey, 18 is a good age for anything with present-day rates of attrition, so I'm not complaining.
那么, 自从Verdana和Georgia字体发行以来, 现在已经18年了。 微软完全是对的, 花了整整10年, 但屏幕显示现在确实 改进了空间分辨率, 也大大改进了光度分辨率, 多亏了反锯齿等技术。 所以现在它们的使命完成了, 是不是意味着 那时我为较粗糙的显示器所设计的 屏幕字体就消亡了呢? 它们的寿命会超过现已过时的屏幕 和大量涌向市场的 新网页字体吗? 还是他们已经建立了自己的 某种不依赖技术的 进化生态位呢? 换句话说,是否它们已被并入了 排版的主流了呢? 我不确定,但到目前为止运行良好。 嘿,以现今的淘汰率来看, 18对于任何东西都是个不错的年纪了, 所以我不抱怨。
Thank you.
谢谢。
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