“Do non-Icelandic designers care enough to properly design and kern the ð for example? I admit that while I do care it’s low on my list.”

Yes, we do care enough. If you include glyphs in a font, they should be given equal respect and attention as those of your native tongue. Think of the user. If they purchased a typeface seeing Icelandic glyphs were there, they assume they are usable for their language. Type design requires attention to detail and caring for other language characters is part of it.

ChrisL

Here is a starting point:

http://diacritics.typo.cz/index.php?id=12

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/fdsspec/diacritics.htm

I completely agree. The ð was just an example. I’m really trying to get what things non-native designers might miss — so I don’t miss them. I mean things in a similar vein to this thread, that pointed out something I was unaware of.

Great links by the way. Good stuff.

Great resources, Chris! I didn’t know about Filip Blazek’s site — thanks.

With the help of Google, I just spotted two other sites:

http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/research.html

(Scroll down to the research paper titled Problems of diacritic design for Latin script text faces.)

http://george-everet.blogspot.com/2007/02/designing-typefaces.html

(It’s a review of books by David Earls and Karen Cheng, but it has comments which Mark and any other budding type designer might find useful.)

Do non-Icelandic designers care enough to properly design and kern the ð for example?

I assume you’ve read your Briem? ;-)

For your question:
I guess you have to accept that you can’t separate typography from language. Let me explain. To my knowledge, a ‘g’ followed by an ‘f’ is absolutely rare in English language.*) In German, though not very frequent, it’s more common. A few words that come to my mind: wegfallen [to drop out], Bergfahrt [ascent], Tagfalter [butterfly], dingfest [fixated] – let alone names like Siegfried or Mangfall.
This, of course, is due to the orthographic convention of writing compound nouns in one word: Ringfinger.

Now have a look at this. A simple term, in two languages, set in a common typeface – common both in England and Germany.

While the ‘train conductor’ looks perfectly normal and unobtrusive (that’s what typographers want to achieve, usually), the ‘Zugführer’ has two major problems:
1. ‘g’ and ‘f’ collide, although kerning is on.
2. It has a capital letter, which is/might be inappropriately fancy

The design of Baskerville isn’t defective – it’s just British. That is, it doesn’t have to repress its descenders, because they’ll hardly ever meet. And it may have swashy caps, because those are rare and should stand out.

Baskerville (or Caslon) will look best with English text. And German will look better with typefaces made by designers who are aware of its peculiarities. Just compare to Aldus, Schneidler or Meta Serif. I’m not saying that this is a black-and-white issue, nor that Non-Germans can’t design