The future font
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- ********
It's funny, when try to represent the future with a digital looking typeface. We go and represent it with some cold, sterile, 8-bit looking font or better yet the LCD typeface. How many more lame braille looking fonts will we have to endure, telling us that, that is how the future of type will look like. Maybe we will lose an entire understanding of type so therefore we just drop type all together and go blind.
If you're looking to represent the future, you might as well use Chinese characters. Get over the shock that you might have to learn another language and accept that Chinese will be displayed across the entire spectrum of digital.
The next question is what does the future look like? Get out the crystal ball and ask yourself.... will the city of manhattan be taken over by zombies infected by a serious case of herpes. Or did the world get hit by WW3 suffering from fallout? In which case, all typefaces suffer from a halt in technology.
Or perhaps, flying cars, talking robots where the world has gotten seriously lazy, stupid and fat. Like the present on steriods, but attacked by a serious case of commercialism.
What is the future font?
- Leigh0
A dynamic typeface?
- this is really cool. the interactive projection at the end could be a little snappier though. good stuffismith
- Nice, here's another one that was similar: http://vimeo.com/523…********
- LAIKA can be responsive to any inputs you could imagine. Here it is responsive to the circadian rhythm of a geraniumhans_glib
- ismith0
If anything the future is without type. Visual perception and interpretation of words is just another step to slow down the process of understanding concepts. Chinese won't be huge in digital type simply because it's too complicated... the only way this will change is if pixels become about 33% of the size and even then I don't know. Pixel-less systems in the future, who knows.
- 1.6 Billion people in China, 4 times the people in America. The instructions for my electronics already come in Japanese********
- ...Japanese********
- So? It's a pain in the ass to read on screen, everything is simplified or enlarged.ismith
- Japanese is different, I assume you see a lot more kana than kanji.ismith
- Still I don't think it will edge out the arabic set, aka english alphabet or romaji.ismith
- and see below. approx. 1 in 6 of the world's population are squatters or nomadicismith
- estimated to be 1 in 3 by 2020 if the trends in india and china keep upismith
- 1.6 Billion people in China, 4 times the people in America. The instructions for my electronics already come in Japanese
- ismith0
Anyway this is the language of the past, present, and future in all societies utopian and dystopian...
- must_dash0
- and people thought chinese was hard to understand.********
- and people thought chinese was hard to understand.
- ********0
- kalkal0
The future is all about the illegibility.
- unless you feel that the chinese language becomes a possible mainstay********
- unless you feel that the chinese language becomes a possible mainstay
- ukit0
I think you have to consider the possibility that the font of the future won't really look all that different. Sure, you can imagine all kinds of cool stuff - maybe we'll all speak Chinese, maybe we'll have dynamic fonts that change from bold to italic when we wave our hand in front of the screen.
But then consider how much computers have changed society over the past 30 years. Now look at the design of your average typeface. Sure there are changes "behind the scenes" to adapt them to a digital world, but the type itself hasn't changed drastically. If anything, the process of standardization has increased the popularity of boring, mediocre fonts like Arial and Verdana. If nothing else maybe that tells you that most people aren't concerned too much with the ins and outs of type and just want a quick way to consume the information they need.
- Peter0
>If you're looking to represent the future, you might as well use Chinese characters. Get over the shock that you might have to learn another language
I wouldn't worry about it if I were you - it's Japanese in the picture you posted, not Chinese.
Doh.
- considering they're all learning english in their state schools it's probably worth learning english.airey
- ********0
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