Fonts for TV

If you are a designer, you take fonts very seriously. Its hard for most techies to understand this and get their heads around it. Don't believe me? Look here, here, or here to see passion about fonts. Or, more entertainingly :



I suspect as we go HD and graphics become more important to our lives, fonts will be too. Ten years of staring at Tiresias may be enough for anyone. Here it is, in all its glory:


Bitstream, who offer Tiresias screen font, also offer other TV fonts.

Another company offering TV fonts is Ascender. One font of particular note is their Mayberry(TM) font which is a one for one replacement for Tiresias. An image below illustrates how close the fonts are visually:



The top font is Teresias, the one below is Mayberry. The most obvious difference is how open the font is (compare for example the letter "S"). Open fonts will render much better at lower resolutions, something important for TV. Ascender also offer fonts for all sorts of TV functions and regions such as these teletext fonts.

This all said, a big part of the design of TV fonts has been geared to low resolution displays historically. In HDTV, I suspect a wider range of fonts are acceptable visually. So long as its not Comic Sans Serif of course ...