Hoefler and Co.'s new typeface is generated from algorithms
wired.comI'm disinclined to patronize Hoefler & Co after the big lawsuit/breakup of H&FJ. Opinions may vary, but based on what I read I thought Hoefler was the sort of person I'd avoid giving my business to.
Seems like a bit of a puff piece.
The tl;dr pull quote:
> [It is a] font created in a virtual environment that can simulate light falling upon any 3-D character in the set, thus eliminating the need to draw tens of thousands of shadows, one by one
The writer clearly doesn't know really all that much about what they're talking about. They mention perfectly placed pixels which doesn't make any sense when talking about vector graphics.
It's a cool way to make fonts, but Metafont has been generating fonts from algorithms since '79
Similarly, we've been using lighting and depth effects with text on the web forever. Not everyone subscribes to the everything-must-be-flat-and-boring aesthetic, and if you want these kinds of effects you can do much more with a good graphics package and 16 million colours than you can in any monochrome font design, enough if it does have an elegant underlying form and it was made using some clever algorithms. It's seems a pretty enough and well constructed font, as with much of their work, but I'm just not sure when I'd use it.
Douglas Hofstadter put some interesting thoughts on the parametric knob-twiddling approach to fonts and other domains of creative expression here:
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/ftp/techreports/TR136.pdf
(Also covered in his Oct. '82 article in Scientific American, Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity)