Font Bureau takes credit for Palm's custom 'Prelude' fonts; our hearts melt
By Paul Miller 
posted June 12th 2009 5:48PM
posted June 12th 2009 5:48PM
posted June 12th 2009 5:48PM
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the uppercase I and the lowercase l still look the same.
Why the hell do people do this with sans-serif fonts?
Sans-Serifs means without Serifs. Serifs are the features added to a font like the crossing part of the "I" in a Serif font. That's why you lowercase "L's" and uppercase "i's" should be similar.
While I agree with you about serifs, upper case "i" doesn't have to look like lower case "L". You don't take the top off a capital "T" when you remove the serifs, so you can have a top and a bottom line on an I. It doesn't even have to be that big, and really helps distinguish the letters. It does, however, make the font look less "clean".
Straight to the point: there has to be a way to make the "I" and "l" distinguishable, and it's annoying when you can't tell the difference.
To illustrate: http://i44.tinypic.com/5zo4s6.jpg
Yes, it's weird, but more readable.
What ever happened to context clues?
What words require you to be able to distinguish whether the character is L or I? In fact, most people do not read all of the letters because we are so accustomed to the sequence of letters making up words that we skip many based on context... we also do not read every word and often fill in sentence structure removing words like that, is, the, etc.
Welcome, Hello, LOL, Melt, Piece, Watermellon, and so many other words are all easily distinguishable... The only one I can think of off hand is Heil... Veil, Geil, where it might be helpful to differentiate between heil and HELL.
You mean Names? HEILBRONER?
By the way, the font is not all that easy to distinguish between the various styles (Bold / Italic / Condensed)... they look too similar to each other.
And, isn't it "The Project was LED by John..." ? Led is the past tense. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/lead
With capitalization rules there's no reason why you'd need to be able to distinguish between them visually since the context will rule out one or the other. Like "I love you", it's clearly an L after the capital I even though they look the same, and you know the first word is an "i" because you capitalize the first letter of a sentence and there's no words made up of a single "L".
Unless for some bizarre reason you want to write i's and L's over and over in alternating upper and lower case (for i and L respectively) you can easily tell the two apart.
I understand your argument completely, for example the word "Illustrate" if used at the beginning of a sentence can cause the cause the exact problem you "Illuded" above.
There really isn't a way to solve this problem at the moment with most typography unless the font is designed to deal with this issue specifically.
Context clues might be able to help you figure out the difference between I and l when reading but I can't figure out why Omnipage OCRuses sans serif fonts. When proofreading to see if it accurately converted the pdf to text it makes it very difficult.
Although I agree the I and l should look different, they tried it with Bell Gothic and I HATE the capital "i".
http://www.identifont.com/samples/adobe/BellGothic.gif
A good example of a lowercase L in a san-serif form is in the typeface Bliss (http://www.typography.net/type/bliss). Note the subtle serif-like curve at the end similar to most lowercase T's. One of my latest faves. Some reason for simplifying areas like this are directly related to screen-reading and DPI. I'm sure it was mulled over during the design process, but ultimately most people are accustomed to this not being an issue (such as in Arial and Helvetica).
On that note, I have a lot of respect for Font Bureau. Even had the opportunity to hear from them back in college at a speaking engagement. I think it's great to see a font house get commissioned for such work. As a designer, I'm well aware of how often typeface designers' work gets circulated like downloaded music (without a great way to stop it or offset it with physical copies).
To those that claim you can tell a sans serif I and l apart: In which order do they appear in my sentence?
Also, context cannot be used in situations like PASSWORDS.
Can I download these for my PC?
I'm curious too.
so they tweaked Helvetica a bit and they're claiming a new font ?? PFFFFFFFF
More futura based. Get your fonts right!
So, by "design" they mean "copy Futura and change the lowercase a". Nice.
Futura copy or not, as long as they changed that damn question mark I'll roll with it.
I want to thank everyone who voted my post down, ....
and i also want to thank my manager and promoter
without whom, this wouldn't have been possible ...
to my parents, my whole family... everyone who was there for me,...
to my fans and groupies .... to all those who keep pushing and didnt let me quit ....
*teary eyes*
THANK YOU, i dedicate this to you, the public .... see you next year, have a wonderful night, you were a great audience ....
*CROWD GOES WILD - clapping and cheering -*
It's actually a ripoff of Adrian Frutiger's Avenir. It's almost exactly the same.
@John
Exactly what I thought when I first saw it. They've straightened the strokes though. There's hardly any curves. Looks great on the Pre's screen, but that screen would make Comic Sans look awesome.
I didn't know Betty lives in San Francisco.
San Mateo / Peninsula actually. San Francisco has a 415 area code.
I don't see why everyone can't just use Comic Sans.
Because that typeface is a joke
-- Sent from my palm pre
Comic Sans is illegal.
Shhh! It's comment's like that that *almost* break the internet! Any more "Com*c Sans" praise, and you'll doom us all!!
When Apple finally starts, they claim to have innovated yet again.
they'll*
Calibri FTW...
I was joking guys. We all know Jokerman is where it's at.
Even as a troll post, that was a particularly stupid thing to say, superhobo. Apple has recognised the importance of fonts from the inception of the Mac OS. The main feature of the 1984 Mac was its ability to do GUI desktop publishing - i.e. seeing on-screen the fonts you were going to print. They developed QuickDrawGX to handle advanced typography features (optical kerning, in-margin punctuation, ligature glyph replacement, etc) that are still unmatched in any OS. They had internal people design fonts for OS 1.0, and have continued to release (with their OSes) some of the best screen fonts ever - Gill Sans and Lucida Grande in particular come to mind.
All of this, long, long before "Prelude" came along, man. So just be a bit careful when deciding where to use your "Apple will copy and then say they innovated" joke, in case you use it in a context where Apple DID innovate, which just makes you look really stupid. Yes, Apple made the mistake of claiming innovation when they didn't, and they are fair game for that - for a while. But not forever after, on completely unrelated posts, and especially not when talking about a field they did actually advance.
So if anyone could help me get a Palm Pre (and a sly way to get out of my AT&T ETF with a couple months left) that would be grrrrrrrrrreat.
Couple months? Wait a couple of months. The Pre will still be for sale.
PRElude font? Clever.
*pats back*
Well done Anthony :P
Could you both stop touching each other please.
Precisely.
the medium version looks Avenir based.. its an awful typeface for a mobile device. even it condensed font, looks like they primary use the medium and this offset n width of the letters is just toooo much
wrong. it looks great on the phone.
haha, you forgot your sig, "Posted from my iPhone."
Font spergin'.
I always thought that the italicized font was from Sprint (if this is the same). Love how it looks in Sprint commercials.
Have to say the choice of font is fantastic, its hot.
Agreed, it's a really nice looking font.
lmao....from the supporter of a phone that still doesn't have copy and paste support until next month.
I copied and pasted that from an iPhone. And it even corrected the capital "P" in the word iPhone for me, look it did it again!
I guess Engadget forgot about the readable text on the iPhone and iPod Touc .
Big deal, so the Pre has readable text as well, welcome to 2007.
I smell a hater. Sad because it's not another iPhone-related article? I apologize.
But I think that the main focus is the simple beauty and elegance that this readable font has, rather than it just being readable.