More than twenty years ago, Jonathan Hoefler made it his mission to promote desktop publishing (and shush its critics) by providing designers with a new generation of fonts: attractive and useful designs which set a new standard in quality and dependability, and are today known as the H&FJ library. Today, as webfonts are buoyed by a wave of early-adopter enthusiasm, they’re marred by a similar unevenness in quality, and it’s not just a matter of browsers and rasterizers, or the eternal shortage of good fonts and preponderance of bad ones. There are compelling questions about what it means to be fitted to the technology, how foundries can offer designers an expressive medium (and readers a rich one), and what it means for typography to be visually, mechanically, and culturally appropriate to the web.
Join Jonathan Hoefler on an exploration of this side of webfonts, and a discussion of where the needs of designers meet the needs of readers. You’ll get a glimpse of what H&FJ has in store, and see why they believe that webfonts promise so much more than just ‘fonts on the web.’
Jonathan Hoefler is the founder of Hoefler & Frere-Jones, the type foundry responsible for some of the world’s most beloved typefaces. So far, 2011 has been a banner year for H&FJ: Fast Company named them one of the most innovative design companies in America, the Museum of Modern Art acquired four of their typefaces for its permanent collection, and President Barack Obama announced his second bid for election amidst a sea of typefaces from H&FJ. While it’s hard to outdo museums and presidents, the next couple of months may be even more interesting for H&FJ.