AUGD: Detach yourself from Myriad
AUGD: Detach yourself from Myriad
- Subject: AUGD: Detach yourself from Myriad
- From: David Feng <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2007 21:02:36 +0800
That's right. If you want to really make a difference in the Mac
world, try building a brand of your own. And start with the fonts.
I've been a Myriad devotee for the best part of four years. I was a
Frutiger fan before, and the very first BeiMac (Beijing Macintosh
User Group) documents had the most Swiss of fonts emblazoned on them
-- Frutiger. This is the font of fame that Swisscom and the Swiss
Post fell for. Even the Swiss authorities are now devotees of Frutiger.
Frutiger's now sort of overused. The fact that Frutiger found its way
onto Swiss road signs made me switch. You see, both I and the Mac
group I'm part of are rebels. We don't like using fonts everyone's
using these days.
Beijing is rapidly becoming the 27th Swiss canton -- typographically.
Univers and to a certain extent, Helvetica, are all the rage. Arial
road signs are been taken down, only to be replaced with signs in
Univers. Unfortunately, there's always an annoying alarm bell going
off in our heads in the People's Republic -- Arial's everywhere.
That's because Redmond was here first.
For the best part of four years, I stuck with Myriad. It found its
way into the 2003 and 2005 BeiMac logos. And those logos will remain
Myriad -- it's our logo and our image at stake. However, effective
July 1st (for real), we're making the move over to Thesis Sans
(TheSans). Thesis Sans looks a lot like Myriad, but now, with the
Olympics looming, everyone is using Myriad. And that's our cue -- to
alight, typographically.
I go out of my way to spend hundreds and hundreds on fonts because
I'd like to take the path not taken by others. To use The Steve's
quotation of Wayne Gretzky: I skate to where the puck is going to be,
not where it has been. We love to innovate -- we as in I myself and
we the people -- the people of BeiMac, too. We love it when we get
challenged or start on fresh new challenges ourselves.
Mac user groups and Mac users have been long-time addicts of Apple
Garamond, and now that Apple's Myriadizing themselves, some of us
(unfortunately) fall into a very 1985-ish (think the failed
"Lemmings" ad) trance of "using whatever 1 Infinite Loop is using" --
font-wise, too. I instead step back at this moment and think: are we
promoting "just Apple", or are we promoting the whole community --
the whole group -- the whole thing?
Myriad and Thesis Sans, even from quite a different, may appear to be
Siamese twins. However, look carefully, and you'll see the
differences for yourselves. The same's true for other fonts, like
Helvetica, Arial, and Akzidenz-Grotesk. (The latter one is the font I
use.) There's a lot to be said about a font that has what may be the
oddest of all capital "Q"s in a sans-serif font.
Very few people in Beijing are using fonts like Thesis Sans and
Akzidenz-Grotesk. We're about breaking through, and about font usage
innovation. We're a group for folks who believe in a company that's
born for innovation. I go out on highway trips on paths nobody's been
on before. The same spirit's in me and in BeiMac in all that we do.
And we'd like to keep it that way.
David Feng
BeiMac
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