Technical Analysis of Microsoft's ClearType Font Collection and Screen Typography Design
By
precompute
Front-window bakery material. Catches the eye, delivers the goods.
Summary
This article provides a detailed technical review of Microsoft's ClearType font collection, examining the evolution of screen typography from early limitations to current advancements. It analyzes the six new fonts commissioned by Microsoft (Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel) and their design principles for optimal screen rendering. The review covers technical aspects like ClearType's rendering capabilities, OpenType features, and specific design considerations for screen fonts, including how they handle near-horizontal strokes, serif styles, and monospaced fonts for coding. The article balances praise for ClearType's improvements with critical analysis of remaining limitations and missing technologies.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledThe first five hundred years of typography (as opposed to calligraphy) were all about the printed page. Until recently, the most carefully designed type on computer screens was simply a placeholder for the final printed version.
Now we are at a crossover point. A lot of people spend a lot of time reading from computer screens, and the quality of on-screen type matters more than ever.
ClearType does a fantastic job rendering near-vertical stems, including vertical stems with subtle (Optima-like) modulations of weight, so these features are an excellent way to make designs more fluid and less constrained by the oppressive pixel grid of the pre-ClearType world.
For code, the all-important parentheses and braces have exactly the right shape (in Lucida Console, the parens look too much like half-circles, and Consolas also makes the stems of the curly braces exactly vertical, which might not be as aesthetically pleasing, but does help differentiate them visually in code settings).
Each of these changes is fairly minor, but add up to a truly great monospaced font.
