Hasta La Ideas

It’s still too early to say if Apple‘s iPad will be changing computing as we know it, but the buying public (at least the ones with blogs) are still gaga over the thing and the company certainly must be happy with how many it’s sold in this first full week of its release. But among all that joy, FontFeed‘s Stephen Coles is a bit disappointed in not just this new device, but with Apple in general, for what he sees as the company’s growing lack of concern about typography, making him wonder “if they really care about typography as much as they did in the 1980s when the Mac launched the desktop publishing revolution.” Nailing his treatise onto the blog, Coles lays out eight of Apple’s major failings with type, from a lack of embeddable fonts in the new iBooks to an absent legible and flexible UI font on the iPhone. It’s well worth reading, particularly if you happen to be on a development team at Apple. Here’s Coles’ first:

Missing in iBooks: Ragged Right Alignment and Hyphenation
This is Typography 101. You don’t need to be a full-time glyph geek to know what full justification without hyphenation does to spacing and readability. Of course, resizable text can’t benefit from all the careful spacing and line break adjustments traditionally made by a book designer, but the least an automated system can do is prevent wordspace rivers wide enough to sail a tanker through. This was one of the more obvious ways in which Apple could have one-upped the Kindle and they dropped the ball.

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