I think it's beautiful only when it comes naturally.

For example the funky German license plate font to me is very natural, probably because it was made a non-designer. A "designer" would never have made something so non-selfconsciously functional. Beautiful.

hhp

The distinction you seem to have made seems false to me.

Even if you are working strictly within a grid you can innovate. There have been some really beautiful pixel fonts made in the last few years.

In a related vein - think of arabic tiles! Some of that work is magnificent even if it is really geometic & mathematical.

But back to pixel fonts - some of whats nice about pixel fonts for instance is how well they mimic something that looks hand drawn (brushwork, or classic roman forms or woddtype forms) but in some cases whats nice about them is how they work on their own pixely terms. Those are the interesting fonts for me.

In these cases new interesting & colorful forms evolve that result in part from the constraint or environment (pixels). Rather than chafe on the pixels - the pixels are embraced.

I'm not saying you would want to set a novel in these fonts - but that shouldn't be the only criteria for virtue.

What's nice about fonts from ephemera is their potential for evoking a feeling like any display face. They have a personality. Too much for a book of text. & it may be somewhat industrially tinged personaility but that doesn't mean there can be no humanity coming through.

You seem to be saying that typographic virtue can only flow from the hand. The logical extreme of which is that we should all be using fonts that mimic handwritting ( beautiful handwriting of course). You can really mean that.

On the other hand beauty is in the eye of beholder I suppose.

What is this 'naturally' you refer to anyway? What do you think of Base 9 & Base12?

> You seem to be saying that typographic virtue can only flow from the hand.

?
I believe in exactly the opposite!

I love pixels (I guess because they're still new), and I also think that embracing them (and not just black pixels either) is the key.

Natural: Well, in the end everything is natural, I guess. But what I'm talking about is something that flows more from the medium than the person creating it. A lot of design is made for other designers, not the user - to me that's "unnatural". I like the Base stuff. One "unnatural" thing in it though is the overly narrow "m" in the 9: I know it's to fit the grid, but it could just have been like two "n"s - it seems that Licko was trying to make an ideological point - which is fine in an experimental face, but not one "for the masses".

hhp