Exactly. The advent of personal computers has made document/graphic design something that everyone can/has to do, rather than something only a few professionals do. This has, of course, exponentially increased the amount of bad design out there – lordy, has it ever – but it also means that a lot of people who want their stuff to look good and who have the intellectual curiosity to do so will seek out information about how to do it.
The worst is when someone uses all caps in a font like Script or Olde English Black Letter
These are accidentally chosen by people engraving names on silver anniversary platters, etc. and the result is nearly undecipherable.
:smack: Sonofabitch. Yep. This is what I get for trying to remember sources I read a couple decades ago before having my morning caffeine. Hell, I even helped edit a couple of papers that looked at stuff like this; you’d think I’d remember better. :smack:
Hi all,
Funny coming across this post as I just recently read a quite interesting critique on the subject as seen by a French linguist (Jean Pierre Lacroux, ORTHOTYPOGRAPHIE)
I’ll resume:
Caps (capital letters) and uppercase are two completely different functions, often confused.
Capital letters have function, placed at the beginning of a sentence, or first name… their use is as important as punctuation, and obeys grammatical law.
Uppercase mainly means that you have pushed CAPS LOCK, either for a title or another obscure use.
I do not know of texts pertaining to English, but Orthotypographie is a real beauty, from traditional printing to Word, he shoots everybody.
Serif in theory creates an “imaginary underline” facilitating reading, I have no idea whether it is true or not.
Sorry, lots of posts came in between my reading and response, namely dracoi.
Exactly true-- under Charlemagne and Alcuin, around the 810s/20s. A big writing reform movement, a standardized use of minuscule, with small case and spaces and punctuation and that sort of thing.
Leaving aside the question of serifs, I have always heard that we more easily recognize the tops of letters, and lowercase letters have much more distinct top halves than uppercase. Supposedly if you lay a ruler across the bottom half of a sentence, you’ll have no trouble still reading it.
Certainly, in actual practice, big blocks of uppercase text quickly cause the eye to wander. They’re so much harder to read than regular text that they scream “I AM BAD AT COMMUNICATING;” I personally feel a distinct drop in my interest level whenever I see dense text in all caps.
Don’t forget proportional and non-proportional (typewriter) typefaces! 
I think the humor of this article illustrates my point - this is an extremely arcane field of interest, and the notion that there would be awards and excitement over a font is what they’re making fun of.
Only if you perceive any type of design as arcane. Whether it’s clothes, cars, brochures, buildings, appliances, books, furniture, web sites, tableware, typefaces, or whathaveyou, it completely surrounds us every day and there are quite a few people who appreciate and understand it even if they don’t practice it.
I’m not sure what your point is in posting what you have. YOU don’t care about typeface design, therefore you think it’s weird that “lay people” are having a discussion about it? I have pretty broad interests yet don’t give a whit about a good 80% of what’s discussed on SDMB, and I would bet that most people I know don’t, either. Yet, it would never occur to me to pop onto those threads and comment that the topic was arcane.
We need Meryl Streep to do a scene, in which she’s explaining how the font you’re using was originally conceived by Fontmaster Shandra DaVincia in the early 90s, and how eventually, after a long cycle of events, it was copied and put on font sites loaded with spyware for you to download and install for free. We could call the movie “The Devil Uses Helvetica”.
I believe if you re-read my posts, you’ll see that my interest is in exploring how a topic that formerly was not very widely known about, not very publicly discussed, has become so. I don’t think it’s necessary for you to take my description, arcane, as judgmental. My guess is that by and large, the people who are more conversant with the field are those who are younger and who have grown up in the computer age, where print, fonts, and typography are much more part of the communicative processes. After all, prior to that time, while some folks wrote with typewriters, many also wrote, or only wrote, with pen and paper. With the ubiquity of keyboards, there has, I think, become an increased awareness of this aspect communication. That was, and is, the nature of my interest here.
Some very clever experiments in there but even that suffers from positing that we use a single method all the time and to the exclusion of others and by falsely positing that “letter shape” is independent of “word shape”. Contextual priming is not directly addressed at all.
Still the author alludes to how we use different methods simultaneously implicitly.
There is a complex dance that occurs. Some high frequency words are recognized as whole items even out of a context, such as “and”, “or”, and “the”. We are also primed to expect certain words because of contextual clues. There is a semantic structure that tells us what sort of word to expect next and a subjective context that limits expected future words as well. Given a context we will trigger a match with fewer cues, looking perhaps just for an expected shape, starting and/or ending letter, and pattern across the top and bottom of the word (pieces sticking up where they should, open spaces in letters where they should be). OTOH a lower frequency word or one that cannot be well predicted from a context will require more individual cues, that is more phonemic sounding out, to trigger a match. It is a constant readjustment of lower level features triggering matches “bottom-up”, and expected predicted patterns “top-down” priming for expected features, ignoring some degree of unexpected features as “noise”, and re-orienting if enough of the the expected pattern is not found.
Here is an example of some of the work that shows how the brain circuitry involved gets triggered.
Your link alludes to “connectivist” and “neural net” models; personally I find that Steven Grossberg’s Adaptive Resonance Theory model (which embeds neural networking within a greater context) is more useful a construct.
All upper case gets in the way of the resonance between lower level features and upper level expectations (and the other way around) but perhaps the greater difficulty of reading all upper case does boil down to how your link describes it: