Colophon

One often finds the colophon at the end of a book, but in the case of this blog it is only right to bring it out first thing

As this blog will be discussing fonts and screen readability—it only makes sense to take advantage of a feature in Internet Explorer called font embedding. This feature allows the font that the designer has specified to be used to view the web page. This is a superior solution to displaying the text as bitmaps because we are able to fully search the text as well as scale the text.

The fonts that we’ve chosen for this blog are based on a technology we developed called ClearType. Future entries will discuss technical and practical aspects of this technology, but for now we highly recommend that if ClearType is available on your machine that you enable this feature of Windows and you tune it for your preferences.

How do you do this? The easiest way is to follow the link in the left margin of this blog to the ClearType Tuning or install the ClearType Control Panel tuner.

Now a note about the type

For those of you using the font embedding feature, the body text is set in Microsoft’s new font Candara. Candara is designed by Gary Munch as a humanist sans with verticals showing a graceful entasis on stems, high-branching arcades in the lowercase, large apertures in all open forms, and unique ogee curves on diagonals. The resulting text is lively but not intrusive, and makes for a friendly and readable text. This font is suitable for email, web design, magazines, and informal settings.

The headline text is set in Microsoft’s new font Calibri. Calibri is designed by Luc(as) de Groot as a modern sans serif family with subtle roundings on stems and corners. It features real italics, smallcaps, and multiple numeral sets. Its proportions allow high impact in tightly set lines of big and small text alike. The font is suitable for documents, email, web design, and magazines.

For those using browsers without font embedding, the text face is set in Verdana. Verdana is Microsoft’s typeface family created specifically to address the challenges of on-screen display. Designed by world renowned type designer Matthew Carter, and hand-hinted by leading hinting expert, Monotype’s Tom Rickner, these sans serif fonts are unique examples of type design for the computer screen.