Ferreira’s Elementar is a “revolutionary” online interface and iPad app that attempts to streamline type design on the computer, for the computer. Released through the Dutch type studio Typotheque ( of Dance Writer fame ), it provides a “Font Navigator” for sliding (or, on the iPad, swiping) through thousands of combinations of styles, heights, and weights to create size-specific, pixel-based fonts. The point: to make text on-screen more legible -- better -- with minimal fuss.
To explain why this is a big deal, we’ve got to nerd things up for a sec. Typically, when you design a font, you use mathematically defined curves and lines that produce easy-to-read results for high-res devices, like printers, but not for low-res devices, like computer monitors. So to give a font clarity on screen, you have to grind through a superbly labor-intensive process called hinting , which adjusts the display of the curves and lines so that they hew to a computer-friendly, rasterized grid. Hinting is about as tedious as building widgets, which means that in a lot of cases, designers forgo it altogether, as Typotheque writes on its blog , leaving the end user to suffer with a crappy, illegible font.
