Too many bad typefaces, and still not enough good ones. So, yes: we still have to be at it :)

Compare it to music:

Each year, more and more music is being created - does this have a positive or a negative impact on culture?

Too many songs or not enough melodies?

Music production is on the rise, yet well known artists as Madonna, Mozart or Motörhead are still heard. Do you think today's new music will still be in use fifty years from now?

''Times, Bodoni and Univers are still in use.''

and they always will be, but i prefer Arnhem, activ grotesk and scotch modern (all pretty recent designs)... i agree that a lot of crap is also being made, but for every 1000 crap type designers you have a Bruno Maag, Fred Smeijers, Nick Shinn, H&FJ ... plus the stuff being designed by the MA classes in Uni of Reading and KABK are all top quality and usually very interesting faces tht id be more than happy to use... as with everything in life quality will be what counts.

Do you think today's new typefaces will still be in use fifty years from now?

Of the types I published 10 or 15 years ago, some have proved to be more durable than others.
Beaufort, Handsome, Bodoni Egyptian for instance; Morphica and Artefact, not so much.
At the time of design, it's impossible to know which is the mayfly, which the quahog.
But I do believe that one or two may still be in use 50 years from now.

Certainly, it helps to update formats: I've gone from PostScript Type 1 ("legacy") to OpenType and now web fonts.
Nonetheless, as long as the legacy formats continue to be supported by layout applications, all manner of typefaces will survive.
It helps that in the digiverse there is scant difference between warehouse and museum—which retailers delete poorly selling stock?
The tale is long.

> Music production is on the rise, yet well known artists as Madonna, Mozart or Motörhead are still heard. Do you think today's new music will still be in use fifty years from now?

Almost none of it.

Mozart worked in a medium that allowed people to interpret his music forever. We get totally fresh readings from someone like Glen Gould hundreds of years later. If you interpret the others you are in a "cover" band.

pbc

Thankyou for the discussion,
I believe that using a metaphor, such as music, is a great way to help answer this question.
I have come to a personal conclusion that every typeface is usable. If you believe a typeface is bad, then you have simply not yet found a use for it.

No, some typefaces are more bad than others.

hhp

Bad as in as badly drawn and constructed (therefore aesthetically bad)?
Or is it the usability you are talking about?

I mean technically bad. Which is a huge deal
because a font isn't a painting, it's a tool.

hhp

I like the music analogy, we know what we like, there are stars and classics songs, the rest is generally just background noise, with the occasional new stars and new classics appearing. Well continue to play our favourites and get knew ones, some won't stand the test of time, that is the way of the world. I guess the difference is these days is that the variety of fonts and their accessibility is incredible, the hard part for the new designer is knowing what makes a font great. I don't believe all fonts are useable, except maybe to the person who designed it, readability is a great reality check, particularly when letters are strung together to form that singular graphic unit called a word.