As you probably know, software engineers spend a significant portion of their time at work programming. Unlike in word processing, which uses proportional fonts (like Times New Roman or Arial), most computer programs are written in text files with monospaced fonts. That is, each letter is the same width — think typewriter-like fonts. In most of the Microsoft development tools, Courier New, 10 point is the standard. The problem with Courier New (see sample) is that the ’1′ (one) looks a lot like the ‘l’ (lowercase L), the ’0′ (zero) looks a lot like the ‘O’ (capital O), and the ‘}’ (curly brace) looks a lot like the ‘)’ (parenthesis) — especially at eight to 10 point font. This of course leads to both eye strain and the occaisional very frustrating error while debugging.
A while back, I took a class with Brendan Hall, a Flash ActionScript guru who lives and works right here in Washington. He introduced me to a relatively new monospaced font that works really well for coding: Andale Mono (see sample). Andale Mono significantly enhances readability and clarifies the letters to avoid the ambiguities described above. The trademark of this font is the dot in the center of the zero — and I can’t mention enough how many times it’s helped me out. After using Andale Mono in my daily work for several years now, going back to Courier New is a strain to say the least. Steve Matteson designed this font in 2000, specifically for on-screen readability, as most other fonts out there are designed for typesetting or printing factors (like print readability and ink bleeding on a micro scale). It was originally part of Microsoft’s core fonts for the web, which was a free download, but discontinued in 2002. Today, you can buy Andale Mono for $30 from Steve Matteson’s company, Ascender… Or, you can download Andale Mono from SourceForge or from Andrew Ho for free (no worries, it’s legal). Just look for andale32.exe, download, scan for viruses (always a good habit no matter what), install, and enjoy.
Finally, just to show you how much I’ve looked into typography, I’ll share my favorite serif (letters with little hooks) and sans-serif (without hooks) fonts for typesetting and printing with you. Designed by Herman Zapf (famous type designer) in 1948, my favorite serif font is Palatino (see sample). Edward Tufte introduced me to my favorite sans-serif font, Gill Sans (see sample). Designed around 1930 by Eric Gill, it was originally used for all the signs, advertising, and timetables for the London and North Eastern Railway. Today, it’s probably one of the more popular fonts out there for design, and most recently, it was included as the standard font for Mac OS X. Talk about lasting power though — designing something in the 1930s that would still be popular in 2005. Compared to other typefaces though, Gill Sans is rather young. Some of the fonts still in use today were created back in the 1500s! That’s ok though, I like my fonts for print classic and classy, which is just not all that prevalent in modern fonts. On the computer though, it’s all about readability. We read slower on a computer screen than we do on paper, so I’ll take any font on the computer that will help close the gap.
Never underestimate paper — it has a higher resolution than any computer screen available and it’s a lot easier on the eyes because light reflects off of paper and into your eyes, versus the screen which blasts the light directly into your eyes. I’ll leave you with one example where paper just can’t be beat: the street maps in your car. Forget those computer maps where you have to futz with zooming and panning then printing out tiny squares of maps. One fold out paper map contains megabytes upon megabytes of information and detail and can provide something the computer map just fails at, context. I even claim the directions you come up with on a paper map are better than the computer’s about 90% of the time as you know better than the data in the database as which streets are flooded with traffic at certain times of the day.
There’s a reason why I’m the anti-technology technologist…
