somefoolwitha.com ...since 2002

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So, I made these fonts years ago, literally years ago in some early form of Fontographer, I forget which but it may even have been a beta version.

I wanted a grungey Courier/American Typewriter font but unfortunately such things weren't as common then as they are now so I DIYed it by printing out one of those quite large and photocopying and screwing up the paper to hell, scanned it in, autotraced in Freehand I think and dropped it into Fontographer.

Next came the sans-serif version, same deal different font (maybe Helvetica, maybe Helvetica Neue, maybe Swiss, I forget).

I have a few other fonts which I'm reluctant to make available as they aren't really fonts 'I designed', they are; Exotica which is two fonts, some flourishy font for caps and maybe Garamond for lowercase but the kicker is that the lowercase vowels are raise with a line under; and WipeOut which is err the font (kind of as I couldn't see all the characters) from the Sony PS1 game WipeOut.

You can download Mass Exodus here, PS fonts for Mac.

And the "my rendering's better than your rendering" argument continues ..

The issue is reminiscent of the "I hate black bars on wide-screen films" brigade who believe that the film should be chopped, panned, scaled and otherwise distorted from the artists original intention simply so that it fits better on their display. #

The "Apple way" still makes far more sense to me, especially when you see the two side-by-side showing the odd relative scaling caused by the Microsoft philosophy. The Apple rendering enlarges the width proportionately to the height as you'd expect; whereas the Microsoft rendering seems to go up in blocks of 3, suddenly jumping to the next width whilst the height increases.

Legibility-wise, surely no-one claim say that the smaller sizes are more readable with MS's rendering than Apple's? People don't read letters, they read the whole shape of the word and for this Apple's smoother, somewhat softer rendering is far superior.

Even more detail and views. (via)

There's an interesting discussion doing the rounds at the moment about the various pros and cons of Apple versus Microsoft font rendering caused by Apple's recent Safari for Windows beta release. I've posted grabs in Flickr how I have mine set up in OS X and Adobe Photoshop's foibles in font rendering, but with regards Apple versus Microsoft I definitely prefer Apple's way. It's certainly a personal preference; Apple's softer, more close to the original font designer's look; or Microsoft's harsher, sharper, arguably more legible (I dont think so) system. There's a good comment on TAUW's post about this. Apple certainly shouldn't in my opinion have swayed from the Microsoft system for their Windows version of Safari, imagine if Microsoft had done the same - leave it to what the user is familiar with.

People do seem to be divided by which OS they use the most, and that makes perfect sense but I do cringe ever so slightly when I glance at a Windows screenshot, or over the shoulder of a Windows user. The Microsoft anti-aliasing is for me just too sharp and clumsy looking. Small text looks barely smoothed at all and larger type is unsubtle, rough looking. Whereas Apple's smoothing is soft and rounded, so the text is easier to read and less straining on the eye due to the comparatively lower overall screen contrast.