pstoyko

Update: One of the top type designers has submitted a proposed interface that is worth considering here. There are two proposals. One is an incremental improvement over the existing Affinity Designer implementation and reaffirms the direction Affinity Designer has taken. It's just a show/hide item in the open type list. The other proposal is a more visual interface. Food for thought. Link below: https://www.klim.co.nz/blog/towards-an-ideal-opentype-user-interface/

I like the open-type features of Affinity Designer. My sense is that this movement has two goals: making the features work; increasing the usage of the features because the interface is easy to use, handy, and reveals the font features in a visual way. I think that's why this is mostly about the interface. For example, I might know that a font supports alternative glyphs. But unless I can see those glyphs, I can't imagine (let alone see) how the alternatives might improve my work. An interface that makes those alternative letter forms visible with a handy preview (or something) and easy to select would help solve the problem of underutilization of typefaces.

I thought I would bring this open-type interface initiative to your attention. The type community is going to lobby Adobe very hard to improve their open-type interface. It seems to me that Affinity Designer can probably do a better job here. The information about this can be found here: http://ilovetypography.com/2014/10/25/why-a-better-opentype-user-interface-matters/ And designers are starting to mock up the interface methods that they'd like to see; something to look to for inspiration, perhaps. Cheers, Peter.