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