At last week's Seybold Seminars in San Francisco, not one conference program item focused on type. This is a change from the days when Seybold routinely featured a "Font Free-for-All" where several representatives or critics of the type industry would trade barbs, insights, and opinions with each other and the audience. Also absent was the gallery of new typefaces that used to showcase exciting new designs from famous and not-so-famous typographers. Does this lack tell us something about the business of type today?

Maybe.

Seybold and Publishing
Seybold began 30 years ago as a business newsletter for the publishing industry -- especially the production end, including printing, typesetting, and color prepress. Nowadays, there are several different Seybold Reports, each one focusing on a separate area of this multibillion-dollar-business. The Seybold Seminars are among the publishing industry's most important large conferences; the mega-show returns to San Francisco every fall, and its early-spring counterpart sprouts like an early crocus in the snows of Boston. Between the two, they capture both ends of the calendar and both sides of the country.

But Seybold isn't aimed just at the publishing industry in the usual sense -- that is, publishers of books and magazines and other "publications." A large part of its audience is really the business community, and a huge amount of the publishing done in this country and abroad is business publishing -- whether simple things like memos and newsletters or extremes like corporate Web sites and annual reports. And all of this publishing, in whatever form, uses type.

The Democratization of Type
The type business has grown enormously in volume, but has shrunk drastically in terms of how much return a company can get from selling fonts. (And the sale of typesetting equipment is virtually a dead art -- or a dead letter -- except for high-volume or high-quality output devices.) As a result, there's been a split. On one side, we have the "business user," who probably gets his or her fonts as defaults on a computer system or as add-ons with some software application; on the other side, there is the "design user," who is part of a graphic design studio, an advertising agency, or the creative-services department of a large corporation, and who requires both quality and novelty in the typefaces available.

Business users have gotten used to thinking of type as a renewable resource, a nearly free commodity that essentially grows on trees. Luckily for the continuing development of well-made fonts and imaginative type designs, the design user still has a budget and still cares enough to pay for the fonts that he or she is using. At least they purchase fonts often enough that there's still a viable business in selling fonts to this "boutique" market. (The rest of the business consists of "OEM deals," that is, licensing the use of specific fonts to the manufacturers of equipment such as laser printers. Somebody makes a penny for each of those millions of "installed fonts" -- as well they should, when the fruits of their labors are being distributed far and wide and put into the hands of everyone.)

Opening up Type?
Seybold's Font-Free-for-All rose out of an infamous keynote session in 1989 in which Apple's Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates announced a new type format called TrueType that threatened the stranglehold Adobe's Type 1 format had on the publishing business, much to the visible dismay of Adobe's John Warnock. Today, the rise of publishing on the Web has added a new complication to this picture of who buys fonts and where and how they're used. Not only do we have to worry about how fonts are distributed electronically -- whether we're paying the type designer for the use of a font that's downloaded to every Web page -- but we have the practical aesthetic question of how good, and how readable, the font looks on a plethora of screens, formats, and resolutions.

The "format" problem may finally be resolved by the advent of OpenType, which makes one font usable on both PC and Mac platforms and potentially removes the importance of the distinction between TrueType and PostScript Type 1 font formats. By virtue of its huge character set, a single OpenType font could contain not only Cyrillic and Greek versions of the same font but compatible kanji and devanagiri fonts, if someone went to the considerable trouble of designing such a super-family. It could also (though I haven't heard of anyone doing this) contain the same basic font in both PostScript format for printing on paper and TrueType format for rendering on screen -- given that the one place where TrueType really shines is in hinting for the screen.

But this all presupposes that OpenType will in fact be adopted so widely that it becomes a de facto standard. Mostly I think this would be a good thing -- and the fact that one-time font adversaries Microsoft and Adobe are behind it gives it a good chance of serious adoption -- but the history of digital type is littered with the dessicated bodies of good ideas that didn't make it to the next watering hole.

What About Typography?
Meanwhile, in both the graphic design studios and the business offices of today, there's a crying need for plain old typographic knowledge. Everyone uses type, but few people know much about it, or about how to use it. Our publishing software makes big claims about its typographic sophistication, but you still have to know what it is you're trying to do before you can achieve it. You can't automate quality -- and the few areas in which automation could raise the quality of ordinary everyday type haven't been addressed effectively by the developers of software. Just take a look at what passes for "default settings" in most publishing programs!

In the first issue of the ambitious (and pretentious) design magazine "Octavo," published in Britain in the mid-'80s (and quoted in an article by Paul Barnes in the first issue of the brand-new type magazine <...>, or "dot-dot-dot"), the editors started off with a statement of why type was important:

"Letterforms surround us in our daily lives. They permeate every aspect of the visual environment and play an essential role in our information-hungry society. The way in which we are presented with information can substantially affect how we absorb it; thought and meaning are diluted by poor arrangement of forms on the page, and are similarly clarified, reinforced and elevated by skilful composition." They went on to observe: "Typography is the point where content and form meet; good typography is the successful union of the two."

For the sake of our own visual environment, we need business models that reward people who design typefaces well, and we also need business models that reward and encourage good typography. Because whatever is created by all the millions of type users in the world today, you and I are going to have to read it.

Read more by John D. Berry.