History of Fonts

~ Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid 15th century
~ Previously the books were written by hand for the elite
~ The middle class demanded literacy.
~ He looked to East Asia who developed the movable type and screw-
type presses being used in Europe by it’s farmers to develop the first
printing press
~ He was a goldsmith,so he was able to make strong letter blocks that
could be reused.
~ The downfall was that the size of the text was so big that it made the
books longer and took more time to set up.

~ This would be resolved by Nicolas Jenson in 1470

~ Jenson created the first Roman typeface based on Blackletter and Italian
Humanist lettering.
~ This type inspired many other modern fonts like Centaur created by
Bruce Rogers in 1914,
Adobe Jenson in created by Robert Slimbach in 1996.
~ Others like Aldus Manutius & Francesco Griffo created the 1st Italic
typeface that allowed more text to fit on the page.

~ To solve the readability problem in 1734 William Caslon created what is

now called “Old Style” type that made letterforms more distinguishable
at first glance.
~ Following him John Bakerville created Transitional typefaces with even
more distinct letterforms.The problem with his is that it was too much black
ink used, making the letters appear too thick.

~ In 1780, two types of designers - Firmin Didot in France and

Giambattista Bodini in Italy created modern serifs with extreme contrast
between strokes as thinner strokes showcased the quality of the metal-
casting work required by better craftsmanship.
~ Vincent Figgins designed the Egyptian typeface or slab serif in 1815,
called “Antique” This was used for posters.
~ Sans Serif Type first appeared in 1816 known as Caslon Egyptian. It
caught on quickly and was used in ads.

~ The next significant development in sans serif type came 100 years later
when Edward Johnston designed the popular typeface for the London
Underground which is still used today.
~ Frederick Goudy started in the 1920’s by creating his iconic fonts still
used today which were Copperplate Gothic and Old Style mimicked from
Jenson’s Old Style Typefaces.
~ In 1957 Max Miedinger designed Hevlvetica
~Futura was developed by Paul Renner and Optima developed by
Hermann Zapf.
~ Digi Grotesk,designed by Rudolph Hell in 1968
~In 1974, the vector fonts were developed and resulted in better
readability at the same time as reducing file sizes.

~ In 2009, the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) was developed and added
to the W3C open web standard.
~ In 2011 all major browsers adopted support for WOFF.
~ In 2016 variable fonts in the OpenType standard strengthened web
typography revolution. Variable fonts can change size and weight based on
where they’re used in a design, within a single font file.
~By the late 1980s, TrueType fonts were created, which allowed for both
computer displays and output devices like printers to use a single file.
~ In 1997, OpenType fonts were invented, which allowed both Mac and PC
platforms to use a single font file.

~ In 1997, CSS incorporated the first-ever font styling rules, and the
following year (1998), the first support for web fonts was added to Internet
Explorer 4 (though they weren’t widely adopted at that time).
 Additional (read over or make additional notes)
the greatest printer England ever produced
readable
slab serif
Egyptomania

Microsoft Calibri’s new successor: Aptos

In 2021 after testing five candidates Microsoft has named the next default font
for its applications. Since then, it’s been called Bierstadt. Now it’s getting a
new name: Aptos.Microsoft Office products fetch almost 24% of its revenue.

Si Daniels, principal program manager for Office design at Microsoft says that
they begin the final phase of the appearance of Aptos as a default font today.

Aptos will remain available in the font list under the old Bierstadt name for
people who are accustomed to it.

Calibri, has been the default font since 2007

Office 365 was launched in 2011.

Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as its CEO in 2014

In 2019, Microsoft asked font designer Steve Matteson to develop a font in the
grotesque sans-serif style that includes the classic Helvetica.

Matteson was still working for the font company Monotype, and he and his
colleagues gave Microsoft four or five proposals to look at, without including
the names of the contributors. Designers didn’t want his connection to
Microsoft to influence the software maker’s decision

Matteson’s work with Microsoft goes back to the 1990s.

He helped with Microsoft’s TrueType fonts for Windows 3.1 and created the
Segoe font Microsoft uses for its current logo and marketing materials. He also
contributed to the aptly named font Curlz.

Microsoft gave Grotesque No.2 it a codename, Koyuk. Then he came up with

the name Bierstadt, taking the name of a mountain in Colorado, where he
lives. In German, Bierstadt means “beer city.”

People didn’t take the name seriously and Microsoft decided to come up with a
new one for the font, Matteson said. Aptos, an unincorporated town in Santa
Cruz County, California

Still, Matteson has nothing but respect for Calibri and its creator, Lucas de
Groot.

London Underground New Font (2016)

London Underground’s original font was introduced in 1916 by

calligrapher Edward Johnston and has been adapted to create
"Johnston100".

Jon Hunter, head of TfL design, said updating the typeface was "an
important step forward" in an an age of social media and apps.
When Edward Johnston's original lettering was unveiled a century ago it
was considered revolutionary.

Monotype, the firm who have adapted the lettering, said designers had
studied old posters to "maintain the soul of the typeface" and bring back
some of its "idiosyncrasies".
In a blog, type director Malou Verlomme said letters like the lowercase "g"
had become "a little bit uniform" over the years.

● In 1913 London Transport's managing director Frank Pick

commissioned Edward Johnston to create a typeface to bring visual
uniformity to the transport network
● Johnston's new typeface, known as Johnston Sans, was introduced
in 1916 and became the basis for the text used today
● Designer Eicchi Kono updated the typeface in the 1970s to adapt it to
new printing technology, making changes like turning full stops into
diamonds
● In 2016 Johnston100 is introduced to make a digital friendly font and
includes new # and @ symbols

Be sure to learn the difference between serif and sans serif fonts, and
then see which ones are used more widely.

United States Department of State changes default font

Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent an email to the state department,

headlined “The Times (New Roman) are a-Changin,” ala Bob Dylan, saying
they will be changing the font for high-level internal documents to the larger
sans-serif font, Calibri, from Times New Roman, which has been used for
more than two decades.

Although the change is facing pushback, this is not the first time the State
Department has implemented a font change to internal documents.
The font was exchanged for Times New Roman in 2004, but at that time had
received criticism because it was changed from the Courier New 12 font,
otherwise known as the typewriter font.

In the email obtained by The Post, Blinken said the “decorative, angular
features” of Times New Roman and other serifs “can introduce accessibility
issues for individuals with disabilities who use Optical Character Recognition
Technology or screen readers.” He added, “It can also cause visual recognition
for individuals with learning disabilities.”

Recently, the United States Department of State changed its own default
font from Times New Roman to Calibri—20 years after first switching from
Courier to Times New Roman. Each move sparked at least 36 points of
controversy. (World Scholars)

The Font Detective

Thomas Phinney was working as the product manager in Adobe Systems’

fonts group when his team received a request from an attorney about a
suspected will forgery.Upon investagation Phinney noticed speckles of stray
ink around each letter and “wicking,” or bleeding, of ink along the paper
fibers. He deduced that the document was printed on an early inkjet printer at
300 dots per inch (dpi). The problem was that type of printer didn’t exist in
1983,” the year the document was purportedly written. Phinney calls it The
Case of the Wicked Will
Digital typography underpins virtually every page with which we interact
online. Psychological research has also shown that even subtle differences in
typography, such as using small caps and old-style figures, can affect a
reader’s mood (as indicated by use of the corrugator muscle in the forehead
to frown) as well as one’s performance on creative cognitive tasks after
reading.

Phinney points to the ScienceGothic.com site, which displays an open-source,

dynamic typeface he’s been working on with funding from Google.He earned
undergraduate degrees in psychology and political science at the University
of Alberta in Canada, where he grew up, then a master’s in graphic arts
publishing with a specialization in design and typography at the Rochester
Institute of Technology. He then began an 11-year career with Adobe
Systems in Silicon Valley.

Phinney pursued his Berkeley MBA via the evening and weekend program.
Earning an MBA might not have been the most obvious career path, Phinney
says, but he used his Haas training to move up the product management
chain at Adobe and later at font management software company Extensis in
Portland, Oregon, where he currently lives.

In 2014, Phinney joined FontLab, a creator of apps for type design and font
creation, as VP, later becoming CEO.

It was a class in managing technology-related businesses taught by Professor

Emeritus Hal Varian that Phinney says was a game changer.
Phinney worked on a case which involved a rabbi who had faked his
credentials to land a job. A family in his congregation turned to Phinney to
validate details of the man’s graduation certificate, or smichah. The rabbi had
taken steps to make it harder to detect, degrading the quality of the document
by providing only a faxed copy, not the original. “The document was dated
1968, but the font in which his name was printed didn’t exist until 1992,”
Phinney says.

By 2018, Phinney decided to make his side gig official. Just two years after
hanging out his virtual shingle as The Font Detective, Phinney earns as much
as half his revenue from font forensics; the remainder comes from designing
fonts for clients like Google.

Most forensic cases fall into one of two categories. The “nefarious” cases are
those like the man who sought to prevent his wife from getting her fair share
of assets in their divorce by forging debt documents, to bamboozle her into
accepting a lower valuation of their communal property. The documents were
printed on a 600 dpi printer that didn’t exist at the time they were dated but
were created in a font that wouldn’t have been available either.

The other type of case Phinney commonly handles involves determining if

documents meet typographical legal requirements, like whether what Phinney
terms “the stupidly tiny” 5-point typography on Justin Timberlake’s CD liner
notes were sufficient to stand as public notification of others’ copyrights on
the album.
Phinney’s dream case is one that has major implications of some sort and
exposes malfeasance that affects a lot of people. He had a close brush back in
2004, when he was asked by journalists to examine memos related to
President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard that
seemed to prove that Bush had disobeyed orders and received outside help in
cleaning up his military record.

Walmart, Costco and other companies rethink self-checkout

Booths, a British supermarket chain, said it’s removing self-checkout stations

in all but two of its 28 stores. In the United States, Walmart, Costco,
Wegmans and other chains have also revised their self-checkout strategies.
Customers at Booths also frequently misidentified which fruits and
vegetables they were buying when prompted by self-checkout machines.
Alcohol purchases also were not smooth transactions through self-checkout
because employees had to verify customers’ ages.
Self-service machines were first introduced during the 1980s to lower labor
expenses. Self-checkout expanded at supermarkets in the early 2000s as
stores looked to cut costs, and during the pandemic, many shoppers used self-
checkout for the first time to minimize close interaction with employees and
other customers.Retailers have found that self-checkout leads to higher
merchandise losses from customer errors and intentional shoplifting —
known as “shrink” — than human cashiers ringing up customers.
Shrink has been a growing problem for retailers, who have blamed
shoplifting for the increase and called for tougher penalties.In One study of
retailers in the United States, Britain and other European countries found
that companies with self-checkout lanes and apps had a loss rate of about
4%, more than double the industry average.
Common tactics for stealing include not scanning an item, swapping a
cheaper item (bananas) for a more expensive one (steak), scanning
counterfeit barcodes attached to their wrists or properly scanning everything
and then walking out without paying.

Adoption of the barcode

Inventor Joe Woodland drew the first bar code with his fingers in sand in
Miami Beach, decades before technology could bring his vision to life.

Every few years, the small town of Troy in Miami County, Ohio celebrates
an historic occasion that for a few giddy weeks puts it on the world map of
the grocery trade. At the time, National Cash Register, which provided the
checkout equipment, was based in Ohio and Troy was also the headquarters
of the Hobart Corporation, which developed the weighing and pricing
machines for loose items . It was here, at just after 8 a.m. on June 26, 1974,
that the first item marked with the Universal Product Code (UPC) was
scanned at the checkout of Troy’s Marsh Supermarket.

The first "shopper" was Clyde Dawson, who was head of research and
development for Marsh Supermarket; the pioneer cashier who "served" him,
Sharon Buchanan.

Legend has it that Dawson dipped into his shopping basket and pulled out a
multi-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum. Dawson explained later
that this was not a lucky dip: he chose it because nobody had been sure that a
bar code could be printed on something as small as a pack of chewing gum,
and Wrigley had found a solution to the problem.
This technology was needed was not his idea: it came from a distraught

supermarket manager who had pleaded with a dean at Drexel Institute of

Technology in Philadelphia to come up with some way of getting shoppers

through his store more quickly. The dean shrugged him off, but a junior

postgraduate, Bernard "Bob" Silver, overheard and was intrigued. He

mentioned it to Woodland, who had graduated from Drexel in 1947.

Woodland took on the challenge.

Woodland left graduate school in the winter of 1948 to live in an apartment

owned by his grandfather in Miami Beach.

It was in January 1949 that Woodland had his epiphany, though the brilliance

of its simplicity and its far-reaching consequences for modern existence were

not recognized until many years later

It was Morse Code that gave him the idea. Woodland had learned it when he

was in the Boy Scouts.

Back in Philadelphia, Woodland and Silver decided to see if they could get a

working system going with the technology to hand. They first filed a patent

in 1949, which was finally granted in 1952. A crude prototype in Woodland’s

own home used a powerful 500-watt incandescent bulb. An oscilloscope was

used to "read" the code; the whole thing was the size of a desk. Woodland

and Silver had the right idea, but they lacked the minicomputer and,

critically, a very bright light with which to "read" the black and white bar

code.

On July 16, 1960, when he first saw the laser, the head of public relations at

Hughes Aircraft Company of Culver City, California, Carl Byoir,

declared they were in big trouble. But the next day, at a press conference held

in the Delmonico Hotel in New York, the company made one of the most

sensational announcements in the history of science. One of their research

scientists, Theodore Maiman, had made an "atomic radio light brighter than

the center of the sun." Maiman produced for the newsmen his "laser," an

acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

The tiny beam was hot and sharp enough to cut through materials

The Los Angeles Herald headlined its story: LA Man Discovers Science

Fiction Death Ray.

Maiman had won the race to build the very first laser, beating fierce

competition from around the world. It is possible to imagine the extreme

excitement that he and his associate Irnee D’Haenens experienced when they

produced that first fickle beamA booklet produced in 1966 by the Kroger

Company, which ran one of the largest supermarket chains in

North America, signed off with a despairing wish for a better future.

A small research team at the powerful Radio Corporation of America (RCA)

was looking at a few new projects. Finally, they lighted on the bar code. A

search of the history turned up some apparently hare-brained schemes: in

one, customers picked out punch cards that identified what they wanted to

buy and presented them to a cashier, who retrieved the goods from a store.

This did not survive long in the grocery business. Then there was the patent

for a system in which the supermarket shopper threw everything into a

basket, which was pushed under a scanner that identified each item and

printed out a bill.

They soon found the Woodland and Silver patent. This was not the

rectangular bar code that Woodland had first envisaged on Miami Beach but

the "bull's-eye" of concentric circles he thought would be a better

design. When he and Silver worked on it, they decided the bull's-eye was the

better symbol because it could be read accurately from any angle.

Printing the bull's-eye bar code proved to be one of the greatest difficulties,

because any imperfections would make the whole system unworkable. A

rotating turret of ballpoint pens, and a pen designed for astronauts that

could write upside down, solved some of the problems The first real-life test

was at the Kroger Kenwood Plaza store in Cincinnati. On July 3, 1972, the

first automated checkstands were installed (One of RCA’s pioneer

checkstands is in the Smithsonian collection.)

The representatives of the grocery trade were charged with finding a way to

introduce a Universal Product Code, a bar code of some description that

would be common to all goods sold in supermarkets and imprinted by the

manufacturers and retailers. The code would carry information about

the nature of the product, the company that made it, and so on .

Manufacturers had existing methods of identification of products, which

would have to be discarded or adapted. Cardboard manufacturers worried that

a printed code might spoil their product. Canners did not want to be obliged
to put bar codes on the base of cans. It took four years to arrive at a workable

proposition to put to the whole industry.

In the end, seven companies, all of them based in the United States, submitted

systems to the Symbol Committee, a technical offshoot of the Ad Hoc

Committee. However, at the last minute, International Business Machines

(IBM) made a surprise bid. It had no technology at all to demonstrate to the

committee, and the decision to enter the competition appears to have been an

afterthought, despite the fact that it had in its employ none other than Joe

Woodland.Woodland was not the creator of IBM’s submission version of the

Universal Bar Code. That fell to George Laurer. Starting from scratch, Laurer

had no prejudices about the appearance of the bar code, though his bosses

had assumed it would be some version of the circular bull's-eye in

Woodland’s patent and RCA’s pioneer system in Cincinnati.

Laurer was handed the specifications for a bar code that had been

determined by the Symbol Selection Committee: it had to be small and neat,

maximum 1.5 square inches; to save money it had to be printable with existing

technology used for standard labels; it had been calculated that only ten digits
were needed; the bar code had to be readable from any direction and at speed;

there must be fewer than one in 20,000 undetected errors.

Mr Evans was convinced by how the scanner read the symbols and by the

flawless demonstration.It was another matter to convince the Symbol

Selection Committee, which was under huge pressure to accept RCA’s bulls

eye symbol which was already functioning. After asking for an appraisal of

the rival symbologies from scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology, on March 30, 1973, in a New York hotel close to Grand

Central Station, the committee met to make its final and fateful decision.

The committee’s chair Alan Haberman asked them first to declare how sure

they were that the symbol they had chosen was the correct one. There was a

very high level of confidence—about 90 percent all round—and the winner

was Laurer’s rectangular code.

Woodland,died in 2012 at the age of 91

It was when the mass merchandisers adopted the UPC that it took off, Kmart

being the first. The bar code took off in the grocery and retail business in the

1980s
After many years of anonymity, the man whose knowledge of Morse Code

inspired the familiar black and white stripes finally got some recognition.

In February 1992, President George H.W. Bush was photographed at a

national grocery convention looking intently at a supermarket scanner and

having a go at swiping a can with a bar code over it. A few months after the

checkout incident, Bush presented Woodland with a National Medal of

Technology.

This excerpt is adapted from Eureka: How Invention Happens, by Gavin

Weightman. Reprinted with permission of Yale University Press.

Amazon Go Stores

Key points
Amazon Go stores offer a "just walk out" shopping experience with
no traditional checkouts or cashiers.
These stores utilize advanced technologies like computer vision and
deep learning to track products and charge customers
automatically.
Amazon is committed to expanding its Go and Fresh store concepts
globally, with plans to open thousands of grocery and convenience
stores in the future.
Amazon offers a range of retail experiences, including Amazon
Fresh (a grocery delivery and pickup service for a wide range of
groceries) and Amazon pop-up stores (temporary retail locations
that showcase Amazon devices such as Echo and Kindle)..

What are Amazon Go stores?

Amazon Go is a revolutionary shopping experience that eliminates

the need for traditional checkouts and cashiers. 'Just Walk Out' is the
technology employed by Amazon Go stores that allows customers to shop
without the need for traditional checkouts or cashiers. This technology
combines computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning, similar to the
technologies used in self-driving cars.

Cameras and sensors within the store track items as customers pick them up
or return them to shelves. Each customer has a virtual cart that keeps track of
selected items. When customers leave the store, their Amazon account is
charged accordingly.

To use Amazon Go, you need the Amazon Go app (available for iOS and
Android), an Amazon account, and a supported smartphone. Upon entering
the store, you scan the app at the entry gate this code serves as your ‘entry
ticket’, and then you can start shopping.
Start shopping
Simply pick up the products you want to purchase and place them in your
shopping basket or bag. Amazon Go stores are equipped with advanced
technologies, including computer vision and sensors. These technologies
track your movements and the products you select in real time.No checkout is
required

Receipt and order history

You can view your order history and digital receipts within the Amazon Go
app. This allows you to keep track of your purchases and review your
charges.

In the US, there are two types of Amazon Go stores:

What does Amazon sell in Amazon Go stores?

They sell: Ready-to-
eat meals Grocery
essentials Local
favorites Amazon-branded items

You can find Amazon Go stores in various locations, with over 25 in the
US, including larger Amazon Go Grocery stores. Additionally, Amazon
operates 19 Fresh stores in London, UK.
 Please don’t make me use another QR code Resturant Menu

QR codes, or quick response codes, aren’t new—they’ve been around since

1994, though they weren’t initially widely adopted outside of Asia.
Hospitality Technology’s 2022 Restaurant Technology Study reported that
66 percent of restaurants in the US used QR code menus, and 19 percent of
restaurants planned on adding them. The stats for Canadian restaurants are
similar, according to the Toronto Star, which pointed to a Dalhousie
University survey that indicated three out of every five Canadians used QR
codes at restaurants or grocery stores in August 2021.

Here are some issues with using QR codes : websites with menus on them
can track consumer behaviour, one more tiny erosion of our everyday
privacy. QR code menus also mean that people need access to a smart phone
or some other kind of device and, if they do have one, that they possess a
certain level of tech savviness, which excludes some potential patrons. And
as Bloomberg reported in 2021, technology that promotes contactless dining
has already been linked to job losses in the service industry.

In 2022, Conor Friedersdorf wrote an impassioned polemic against them for

The Atlantic, and in 2023, the New York Times published an article on their
alleged demise, full of quotes from people who loathe them. Physical menus
are more than just aesthetically pleasing; they can also serve as important
historical documents. The New York Public Library has approximately
45,000 menus dating from the 1840s, a collection that they’re in the process
of digitizing through their “What’s on the menu?” project, and it’s amazing
how much can be gleaned from those documents. The first and most obvious
piece of information is what people were eating in a particular time and place
—along with how much (or little) they paid for it. One of the menus in the
NYPL’s collection is from Mart Ackerman’s Saloon in Toronto, where,
back in 1856, diners could get a porterhouse steak with a choice of sides for
$0.50—about $12 in today’s terms—accompanied by a glass of Siberian
cobbler, ladies’ fancy punch, or a cocktail simply called the eye opener, all
priced $0.13—$1.50 today—or under.

Gora leads a research group at the University of Augsburg dedicated to the

culinary environmental humanities. Among other themes, the group has
explored the idea of culinary extinction—namely, what happens when the
animals and plants used for a popular food go extinct because we have eaten
them out of existence? Take the passenger pigeon, for example, which died
out in the early twentieth century thanks to overhunting. As passenger pigeon
numbers rapidly declined, passenger pigeon pie was still on the menu,
according to Gora, at the storied Delmonico’s Restaurant in New York
City. Gora says it’s possible that the pie really did contain passenger pigeon
meat, but it’s also possible that it was the meat of some other, more common
pigeon.

Menus can also give us insight into attitudes toward gender. One fascinating
example from history is the so-called “ladies’ menu”—a menu printed
without prices so that women wouldn’t know how much their dates were
spending on them (the practice mostly disappeared after a California woman
threatened a restaurant with a discrimination lawsuit).In an essay titled
“Today’s Special: Reading Menus as Cultural Texts,” she recalls working as
a cook at a restaurant that served two versions of the same meal: “The Dirty
Brunch” and “The Clean Brunch.” “The Dirty” came with bacon and
sausages and, her boss told her, tended to be ordered by men; “The Clean,”
by contrast, came with hummus and salad and tended to be ordered by
women.

But most of all, menus tell us about things that are ephemeral: foods, yes, but
also often the places that serve that food as well.