Any web designer will tell you that one of the most important aspects of creating any type of work is knowing that once it’s done, the vision presented is as the designer conceived. Whether it’s Pollock and his action paintings, a Charlie Harper illustration for a children’s text book, a magazine cover or an interface on a computer game, the designer or artist wants it to look a certain way. They want it to fulfil their vision. What they don’t want it for it to change, flap about, be different. This is where the web browser holds its own in terms of its ability to wind a designer up quicker that a well practiced Swiss watch maker.
As online technologies make leaps and bounds in a hundred directions at once (which in general we all love) there’s always one area where you can guarantee it keeps tripping up. Fonts and specifically the rendering of them. When you think about this it’s quite strange as fonts, more specifically type in general, has had an impact on the modern world to such a great degree that it’s difficult to quantify it’s impact. The modern world just wouldn’t be modern without our ability to create, store, cut, copy, paste and crunch textural data. Standing on the shoulders of giants would be much more difficult, maybe impossible without such a simple thing as being able to manage information in simple, powerful and meaningful ways.
Any yet, here we are. We have things crawling over the surface of far away planets, other relics of space flight made in the 1960’s which have traveled to the edge of our solar system and now plunge onward, into the deep unknown space beyond and we still can’t get a the main web browsers, our windows into the oceans of online information, to render simple text nicely. How long will it take to get this right? All I know it that until that day arrives web designers will always have once more wrinkle, one more grey hair and one more rant a day than they actually need.