l don’t undersand why we Iive in a worId where capital I and Iowercase l are allowed to Iook near identical. PeopIe are paid to design and seIect fonts and they have aII agreed on this Iudicrous convention.
Why has this happened? And is there anything I can do about it as an individuaI or as part of a coIIective?
I can’t even do thorn-master Sxan’s thing and insert a character code because U+026A, ɪ, is too damn small.
TBF the fashion for sans-serif typefaces predates the spread of personal computing. They became popular around the sixties, with the modernist design in printing, namely in magazines. Then in the eighties sans-serif became the ‘face’ of corporate design. The nineties saw the prevalence of Times New Roman in home and office printing since printers evolved to handle fine detail and WYSIWYG. And finally the 2000s saw web design mature and switch to sans-serif again for the ‘modern’ look, plus humanist typefaces started looking nice with the higher resolutions.
Funny thing: Apple bet from the start on screens gaining high resolution, with their font rendering being true to the shapes, while Windows aligned them to the pixel grid. They probably converged now with the high-DPI screens (haven’t seen Windows on a hiDPI yet), but Windows retains the crappy quirk of the font sizes jumping annoyingly between sizes, namely when zooming on web sites. MacOS’ font resizing / zooming feels so nice in comparison.