Bold, Italic, Emphatic—Possibilities for Interactive Type

Typeface design principles originated in the days of metal type, when creating fonts was laborious and constrained by physical requirements. Digital type design has always been firmly rooted in historical conventions, even though fonts are now drawn with vectors and pixels. Designers readily embraced obvious capabilities such as vector files' scalability, eliminating the need for separate sets of glyphs for each point size. However, the guiding philosophy of digital type has been to adapt the craft of physical typesetting to the screen. The paper describes creative approaches to increase user interactivity with fonts, and the potential to evolve font technology to be more in tune with modern digital communication.