#43 — Dashing Swashes for 🎄

Every character you type – whether letters like ‘a’ and ‘b’, punctuation marks like ‘?’, or even emoji like 💪👬👍 – has an ID number that computers use to store it. In order to communicate, computers need to agree on a common roster of how to assign these graphemes to numbers and vice versa. These rosters are known as character encodings. If you’ve ever stumbled across a website that looked readable, but certain characters were printed incorrectly (like “won’t” showing up as “won’t”), that’s because the computers were using slightly different encodings (in this case, UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1).

Until 2005, Unicode did not have one of the characters in the Bengali word for “suddenly”. Instead, people who wanted to write this everyday word had to combine three separate, unrelated characters. For English-speaking teenagers, combining characters in unexpected ways, like writing ‘w’ as ‘\/\/’.

To help English readers understand the absurdity of this premise, consider that the Latin alphabet (used by English) and the Cyrillic alphabet (used by Russian) are both derived from Greek. No native English speaker would ever think to try “Greco Unification” and consolidate the English, Russian, German, Swedish, Greek, and other European languages’ alphabets into a single alphabet. Even though many of the letters look similar to Latin characters used in English, nobody would try to use them interchangeably. ҭЋаt ωoulδ βε σutragєѳuѕ.

During the block period, the browsers renders your text in an invisible font. This is why on a lot of web font heavy website, during the first load of the page you will see no text or worse, phantom underlines.

During the swap period, the browser renders your text in the fallback font (in the example in the diagram, that would be the default `serif` font.

The failure period means no font has been found, in which case the browser renders your text in the fallback font, as above.

In the post-war period of the 1950s and 1960s, there was a pretty pervasive mentality among designers that their field could and should be part of the efforts to rebuild and reconstruct, moving on with both rationality and idealism from a messy recent history. It was out of this mindset that the Swiss style of graphic design—clean, logical, mechanical in its perfection—became a global phenomenon.

Part of its charm is its inoffensiveness. Helvetica is appropriate for most occasions because it’s probably been used for that exact occasion before. “There’s a quote in the film from Manuel Krebs of Norm, who says something like ‘If you’re not a designer, or you’re not a good designer, use Helvetica bold in a flyer and it’ll look good,” says Hustwit. “Use it in one size, one weight, and just pipe out what you want to get across.” So use it for anything. You could also take a page from Massimo Vignelli’s book and use it for everything.