"someone who claimed no type designers use OS X"

So the typoratti sporting shiny new Mac laptops and iPhones at TypeCon were just using these as fashion accessories to go along with their black Audi S4's and wire rimmed glasses? And back in the office they all use Windows XP and FontLab?

"someone" is pulling your leg or very badly informed. :-)

No, that's the thing -- he was completely convinced of this, and he's deadly serious that the horrible antialiasing (and numerous other technical deficiencies) on OS X makes it useless for type design. Of course everyone I know personally is using Fontlab Studio on OS X (with the occassional XP system), but we're all nobodies in the greater scheme of type design. I couldn't find any specific references on Google to the software/hardware used by Slimbach or Zapf or Kobayashi or Frutiger so I'm left simply wondering, now that the bug is in my brain :D

Does FontLab ever mention platform breakdown numbers? Since they pretty much own the market (at least as far as I know! :P) I can't imagine they'd have to worry about some competitor getting an advantage by knowing where their sales are.

I switched to a Mac recently, and I'm using TypeTool on OS X. I read somewhere that most graphic designers (and type designers I presume) use OS X. Web designers, on the other hand, I believe is mostly in the PC crowd.

I have photos of Akira standing in front of his big shiny Apple Cinema Display and drawing beautiful letters on screen. Don't know if he also uses a PC, but he does a fine job on his Mac. Zapf and Frutiger don't do computers - they rely on Akira for that. I don't know about Slimbach - Tom can likely tell us about his preferences.

There are certainly a lot of type designers on Windows and a lot on Macs - and quite a few who work on both platforms. It would be interesting to see the numbers breakdown.

Interesting that Zapf doesn't do computers, I remember hearing about him being one of the first non-CS guys exploring digital type back in the 60s, so I just assumed he did at least some things of his own digitally.

He definitely was interested in computers and experimental technologies, and still is. He undoubtedly uses a computer for some correspondence and such. But it seems right now his focus is on drawing beautiful forms in his amazingly steady hand and collaborating with digital experts to see his vision through in FontLab and similar tools.

Tell your 'friend' to see the movie Helvetica, 'nough said.

Your friend is "convinced" but you give no evidence of what convinced him/her. I know a bunch of type designers. Some use Mac, some use PC, some use both at least for testing. Some like the Macs with intel chips because they can do both on the same machine. The antialiasing thing makes no sense. There are plenty of folks who prefer the Mac way of displaying over PC. The only issue may be screen use only fonts for web where the user-base of web pages is 90% PC so designers of screen media look to match the majority's expectations. Most font sales are for print media users who are mostly Mac using graphic designers. I don't have numbers from a real study but I have enough anecdotal experience to know that your friends assertion that "No Type designers use OSX" is just plain ridiculous and false. I would guess that the majority of type designers use Macs to design type but a greater number of computer geeks who do post-design production, tweaking, verification, and TrueType hinting, use PCs.

ChrisL

>The antialiasing thing makes no sense.

esp. as most customers are using InDesign and other Adobe apps that don't use system rendering.

Robert Slimbach uses a Mac, OS X, and FontLab 5.

At Adobe Type Development, we all use OS X primarily or exclusively for design and production, except Thomas Phinney who uses Windows, as does QA and some other people here and there. But Robert uses FontLab on OS X, as do I and Miguel. I always have. Some past employees like Jim Wasco, Fred Brady and David Parsons used both Mac and Windows. Linnea Lundquist and Carol also used a Mac. Of course we used to have proprietary Unix tools which were used for font editing in the "old days".

I remember there was a time when we thought maybe Mac OS was going to die and we'd all be stuck with production on Windows, but then thankfully OS X came along and we were all saved! :-)

Well, his arguments were entirely too technical for me to understand or repeat, to be honest. I said that he sounded like a programmer with an interest in type rather than a type designer, because everything he was concerned about were issues of rendering, interpolation algorithms, pixel grid fitting, etc -- which as I pointed out at the time are meaningless to 90% of designers since the imagesetter doesn't care about any of that stuff. In my 15 years I don't think I've ever heard the word "algorithm" uttered at a Type Directors Club or AIGA gathering, outside of technical presentations by someone from Adobe back in the days of Multiple Master and such.

But it did pique my curiosity as to what folks really were using out there beyond my personal knowledge.

Thanks Christopher, that was my memory of Adobe back in the 90s when I spoke with Carol a few times, but it was all pre-OSX, so I couldn't raise my hand and swear that it was still the case.

"...everything he was concerned about were issues of rendering, interpolation algorithms, pixel grid fitting, etc —..."

That all sounds like hinting issues, not design issues.

ChrisL

Most of the type designers I know use OS X. They are either life-long Mac users or recently switched. So I am afraid your friend was misinformed, because the truth is just the opposite of what he said.

>I just had a fascinating discussion with someone who claimed no type designers use OS X

>the truth is just the opposite of what he said.

Sorry, that's equally wrong.

Si

Sorry. Not quite the opposite. But the majority of professional type designers are on OS X.

>Not quite the opposite

The original claim didn't specify "professionals" either. If we're talking about active type designers, I would say FontLab licenses sold in, say, the past three years would be a good measuring stick, and I doubt the numbers would be as slanted as you suggest.

Time for a poll!

Speaking as part of the Windows-using minority, I'm clear that the majority of professional type design today is done on Mac OS. There is a substantial minority on Windows, though. I can't say whether the Mac percentage is 60 or 75, but I'd say it's somewhere in that range.

The reasons I'm on Windows are mostly, but not entirely, unrelated to type design:

- new beta versions of FontLab come out on Windows a long time before the equivalent Mac version. (The time gap is a lot smaller if you're waiting for the official release, though.)

- Adobe has a bunch of internal business processes that are Windows-centric

- Outlook sucks less than Entourage.

- when I switched from mac to Windows for my main machine, OS X had just come out and was not really ready for prime time, plus you couldn't get a Mac laptop with 1200 pixels of vertical resolution on its LCD screen. Both of these factors are no longer true, however.

Note that you won't see rasterization differences on my list of why I'm on Windows! Yes, I liked Microsoft's rendering better than Apple's the last time I did a head-to-head comparison (which was not recent). But most of my testing and work is in Adobe applications, which use Adobe's rendering, regardless of platform. So it's not a big issue.

Cheers,

T

"...he sounded like a programmer with an interest in type rather than a type designer, because everything he was concerned about were issues of rendering, interpolation algorithms, pixel grid fitting..."

Sounds to me like an interest in screen fonts ;-) The poll will show that most people Here use Mac OSX.
What the poll will not likely show is where they expect the "fonts" they produce to qualitatively peak.

"I liked Microsoft’s rendering better than Apple’s the last time I did a head-to-head..."
Thomas, I assume this also means you like MS rendering better than Adobe's ;?

Cheers!

Type designers like apple:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wasianed/2097101599/

At least in Reading.

Maybe I'm hopelessly naive and I am also a graphic designer NOT a type designer, but wouldn't it behoove type designers to at least test out their fonts on the Mac OS? Given that most graphic designers use Macs and we represent the bulk of the font-buyers—at least of boutique fonts as opposed to the ones that come with the OS or in large Adobe packages. There are probably some talented graphic designers using windows somewhere out there, but I doubt they'd get much work (at least in NYC). This business is heavily Mac-dominant here. Again I know next to nothing about font creation, merely about font usage.

Just to tie into what Ralf posted, in the current MATD course at Reading (three of whom can be seen in the photo with Gerry), ten of the twelve of us use Apple laptops, each running system 10+. An 11th student is on a Windows PC, but seems to be teetering on the edge of conversion! And the 12th is running some sort of Linux thing. The Typography department's computers are also Macs, and the little application we install to print only works with OS X.

I wonder what the Hague's set-up looks like? I suspect they have at least a few Macs. So, if this is any indicator, I don't think many type designers out there are boycotting OS X. At the ATypI conference in Brighton last September, there certainly were PCs, but really quite a lot of shiny macs as well.

I always use whatever font I'm working on as my Safari font, so that I'm reading it at whatever websites I browse that allow visitors the option of making their own font choices.

Just like deity Slimbach, seeing the world in his image everywhere he looks.

An 11th student is on a Windows PC, but seems to be teetering on the edge of conversion!

i wouldn't call it conversion. i'm just afraid that mac support of OT is so buggy that i can't just rely on it to work (like it does in windows) without testing some basic scenarios. could i say you're coverting to PC if you're installing windows to build, set, test your Indic? >^p

No. I'll be installing Windows on a partition of my macbook. That's like having an affair, not a divorce or a conversion. You could drop me into that photo above, and no one'd even know about my Windows dalliance.

Some would call that "co-habitation" :-)

ChrisL

I think, for those of us who have tried to produce type that is functional for both platforms, we have no choice but to venture forth accross the abyss to the "other platform" in attempt to be fair about testing. I wish I could afford a new Mac that allows switch-hitting. There will always be little annoying things creep in when any OS is reworked so we will always have a need for testing the computer foreign to us, whichever that may be.

ChrisL

That picture is so obviously a fake - notice the mobile phone - it's not an iPhone. Nice try thouugh Ralf.

Cheers, Si

Sii, we can't get iPhones because they come with two-contracts, and we're just here for one year :(

Is anyone else ever surprised that all the Macs in design schools don’t get mixed up when students are coming and going? Of course, that might be because design students only look up from the screen for important guest lecturers.

those lads might want to take those laptops off their laps:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2004/dec/09/health.medicineandhealth

powers