Digital Type Challenges
Charles Bigelowa and Kris Holmesb
a: Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA; b Bigelow & Holmes Inc.
b: Corresponding author: Charles Bigelow (chuck.bigelow[at]gmail.com)
Abstract: Second only to the invention of typography itself, digital typography has been the most transformative of the technological changes that have taken the hand setting of hand-cast and hand-printed type — the standard for 450 years — to worldwide ubiquity on the glowing screens of billions of smart phones and personal computers. Like its predecessor font technologies, digital typesetting began as a way to set text faster, but it has posed several challenges, of which the first and overarching one is resolution. Technical, perceptual, and economic in its aspects, resolution is the consequence of rendering traditionally analog forms as digital information, from pen, to punch, to photo, to pixel. Since 1980, we have designed digital type during its hegemonic advance toward world domination of literacy. That sounds scary, but the numbers seem benign: more people can now read more languages in more writing systems in more countries on more devices than ever before. The task of the type designer is to face the challenges of digital type and create the fundamental forms of what are often called fonts. We present many of the challenges we have confronted, and how we met them.
Keywords: design history; digital typesetting; font technology; handwriting; icons; Latin scripts; non-Latin scripts; traditional typefaces
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Cite this article:
Bigelow, C., & Holmes, K. (2025). Digital type challenges. Visible Language, 59(1), 23–54. https://www.visiblelanguage.org/journal/issues/59-1-digital-type-challenges
First published online April 27, 2025. © 2025 Visible Language — this article is open access, published under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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