Just my type

Wake up and go about your day — you’ll run into typography as soon as your eyes open. You’re looking at it right now in this app. A typeface told you to ‘slide to unlock’ and brought you here. You see type while addictively checking email, texts, Facebook updates, tweets and even the time. You’ve invited this new typographic presence into your life without a second thought, and device manufacturers are now hoping that they can capture your attention, mood and buying power by tweaking this element of design.

Two recent events indicate a shift toward more refined typography on mobile devices, now that high-resolution displays, like the iPhone’s Retina Display, have made it possible.

Design and art publisher Gestalten earlier this year released “Twenty-Six Characters: An Alphabetical Book about Nokia Pure,” about the cellphone maker’s new digital and house typeface. And in October, when Google announced the Galaxy Nexus from Samsung with Android 4.0, the director of user experience for Android, Matias Duarte, spent time discussing the Nexus’ new bespoke typeface, Roboto. He told The Daily, “When you’re dealing with anything visual, typography is the foundation on which things are built. It contributes to distinctive design, which is an essential differentiator in everything from cars to flatware to mobile devices.”

“Twenty-Six Characters” is a stunning typographic specimen book showcasing the fundamentals of typographic craft, using Nokia’s Pure as a high-profile case study. Neophytes beware — it gets highly technical very quickly. You’ll find lighthearted descriptions of such classic typo-geek topics as: the differences between hyphens (-), en dashes (–) and em dashes (—), hinting for screen-based legibility, and how the typeface isn’t a mere 26 characters, but rockets up to 891 glyphs of punctuation, language-specific characters and mathematical symbols.

There’s also a tour of the Helsinki street signage that gave typographic legend Bruno Maag and the Nokia Design group the inspiration to craft a font family that subtly reflects the aesthetics of everyday living. A typeface created to fit our visual environment is a welcome change from older, harsh and pixelated device typefaces, like Nokia’s iconic former typeface, Nokia Sans, that were limited by low-resolution displays.

Susan Kare, designer of the original Apple Macintosh fonts and icons, noted, “High resolution has afforded interface designers the luxury of choice beyond creating letters in a [limited] grid.”

Which leads to the question, could this choice in typographic craft get you to ditch your iPhone — which uses the classic and ubiquitous Helvetica along with whimsical candy-glass buttons — for an N9?

Industry creative types note that typography is part of a complete product design approach.

“If I put up Helvetica, Frutiger and Segoe, [consumers] won’t know the difference. They won’t be able to specifically say it’s the beautiful letter spacing, but there’s an overall impression given that it’s a beautiful product. And, as much as I’d like to say the typography sells the device; it’s more the hardware,” said Jeff Fong, design lead for Windows Phone, which was relaunched last year with an elegant new interface using an adjusted version of the typeface Segoe.

“The device is a holistic experience that needs to be cohesive. Every piece of the package matters, and design is an important part of the puzzle,” said the director of Nokia’s brand and marketing studio, Aapo Bovellan.

Android’s Duarte asked: “Can color sell? Can animation sell? Typography contributes to the aesthetic and emotional relationships people have with their products.”

Typeface selection is a passion for designers, but its importance beyond aesthetics is actively being researched.

Michael J. Spivey, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Merced, and author of “The Continuity of Mind,” pointed to research that focuses on the primary use of fonts: reading. “If you pull all the data together, most research shows there’s no difference in reading speed between typefaces — serifs, sans-serifs, humanists. You tend to get exaggerations in marketing studies about consumer preference or usability with typefaces. Someone may say one typeface appears easier or more appealing to them over another, but they’re actually responding to their own personal predilections for the style of one typeface over another.”

Spivey noted that the human eye and mind adapt to treacherous interfaces, horrible font choices and poor writing with relative ease. Recipients of the decade-old chain email in which the letters in the middle of words were simply scrambled could decipher it with little difficulty. There are also studies showing that if you remove the spaces between words and ask research subjects to read, the eye-movement pattern (i.e., where the eyes stop and how long they stay before moving again) is the same as if the spaces were there.

Unpublished research that Spivey conducted with colleague Sarah Anderson of the University of Cincinnati has been looking at the effects different fonts have on your understanding of concepts.

“Type the word ‘Justice’ in Courier. People will immediately jump to the legal system and list courtroom, judge and prison sentences as what they see as the meaning of the word in this context. Compare this to Edwardian script: There we hear and see freedom, liberty and revolution instead.”

That dramatic example plays out in the frequently trafficked areas of your smartphone. How many times a day do you look at your lock screen: the time, date, battery indication and notifications? The whole character of a device is there, in a few numerals and letters. The subtleties of the typeface come out to affect your perception of the device. Does it look vacant and imposing, elegant and connected, human, techy, comical, or maybe even sinister?

Such impressions are crucial. “Your device is your partner now, not just your tool,” said Spivey.