I don't care whether it's professional, amateur, or just for fun.
I do it for fun/amateur - primarily helping friends with small things here and there. I've won a competition, and got fucked over by another - but overall it's a pretty fulfilling creative outlet.
For the professionals, any tips in getting a decent foothold? Meaning, getting better and having an eye for things?
You don't have to showcase anything, but any example work would be appreciated.
Considering /art/ is averaging about one post every two years, perhaps I should ask my question within this thread and hope some graphic designers pop their heads out to talk.
I'm becoming more interested in fonts. More towards the functionality side of things, rather than any aesthetic concerns. What makes a readable font, and particularly what makes fonts appropriate for different mediums?
Printed books almost invariably use serif fonts, and websites sans serif. Is there a practical reason for this, or is it all to do with tradition or taste?
Are there any particular fonts you lot enjoy using?
Sans-serif fonts are dominant on electronic devices for one simple reason: Pixels.
With modern high-resolution screens, it isn't as big a problem as it used to be, but through most of the history of computing, making scale-able fonts has been a massive ballache. You have two problems: A) Making a font that can be made larger, without losing sharpness. And B) you need a font which can be shrunk down and still be legible.
Most of the comic fonts that have been developed for computers have been optimised on the basis of using lines that are 1 and 2 pixels wide. Take a very close look at your screen, you'll probably see that vertical lines on this text are about 2 pixels wide, and horizontal lines are mostly 1 pixel high. (Note that things are quite a bit more advanced now though, when you look closely you'll see that most fonts now have soft edges rather than sharp lines, this is mostly thanks to some sort of satanic ritual software that I don't understand.)
Due to the above, serif fonts don't do well with computers, an accurate reproduction of a serif at a size that would be small enough for body text, is quite difficult. Open up word and type some text in times new roman, take a look at a lot of different sizes. You'll see that when viewed at a size of around 12pts, the shape of the letters is only a very rough approximation of the same text at 24pts. On the other hand if you open up a book with text about the same size as 12pts, the serifs are dead sharp.
That's starting to change with the introduction of extremely high resolution displays. The latest phones and tablets are approaching the resolution of print, so on-screen typography on those platforms is less constrained than it would be traditionally. iOS devices have truly gorgeous typography.
>Note that things are quite a bit more advanced now though, when you look closely you'll see that most fonts now have soft edges rather than sharp lines, this is mostly thanks to some sort of satanic ritual software that I don't understand.
It's a combination of anti-aliasing and subpixel rendering. A font that looks quite blurry at 100% zoom can look very crisp at a realistic viewing distance because of how our eyes perceive contrast.
“‘Bath and slept with Gladys,’ runs one entry in the diary. Such Gill family intimacies seem routine, a habit. A few weeks later there are more surprising entries; ‘Expt. [experiment] with dog in eve’ [the rest has been obliterated]. Then, five days later, ‘Bath. Continued experiment with dog after and discovered that a dog will join with a man’”
This thread really is .gs in a nutshell. Eighteen months without a response, a tangentially related question, an alarmingly detailed and informative reply, followed by a neat segue into incest and beastiality.