CorporateType

Efficiency underlines any company’s success. Efficiencies are found at every stage of a company’s operation from production to administration and increasingly through communication. Efficient working practices are also found through ergonomics - providing well designed working environments that help employees find their full potential.

CorporateType ensures the efficient and intuitive use of fonts. Everyone who uses fonts to design or communicate – designer, web master, administrator or secretary – expects to be able to easily identify the corporate fonts in the menus of applications, for instance through unique naming. Style designations like bold, italic, and bold italic can be applied through the formatting options of a document template. This guarantees transparent and correct use of the fonts defined by corporate design guidelines.

Applying refined typographical elements to a company’s corporate design and making it work consistently across
the organisation will only be achieved efficiently by not adding to someone’s existing workload. It means automating the process. For example, integrating small caps or old-style figures, building in company-specific characters, adding matching Euro symbols, logo or brand symbols needs to be made a one-off task when mapping to keyboard layouts. Addressing the entire font application within the corporate brand design guarantees consistent font quality in all communications.

But what about screen legibility? With so much material being produced for on-screen reading now, screen display has taken on a new importance. Not all fonts possess the criteria for optimum screen legibility. Older operating systems (Mac OS Classic and pre-Windows 2000) require special font rendering software for PostScript fonts but are already optimised for TrueType fonts which often make TrueType fonts the first option for many presentation and web applications.

However, the poor hinting of many TrueType fonts results in lower screen quality at typical text point sizes. This is unacceptable for both aesthetic and usability reasons. Hinting improves a font’s legibility on relatively low-resolution monitors. Even modern monitors have a resolution of about 35 points/cm, which is extremely low in comparison to laser printers with approximately 240 points/cm, or offset printers with about 1000 points/cm. CorporateType expands the inadequate hinting of TrueType fonts with the necessary form description definitions to ensure the highest quality in onscreen font display.

CorporateType and Ergonomics:
Name changes: unique naming convention (independent of operating system and font format)
Automatic: correct linking of font weights with text formatting options within applications
Integration process: addition of true small caps and old-style figures
Building block principle: integration of important corporate symbols into the character set (icons, logos, etc)
Transformation: conversation from PostScript to TrueType
Reader-friendly: professional TrueType hinting (different quality levels).


Screen display of a font without hinting:
letters are deformed in smaller point sizes


Screen display of a font with professional
hinting: letters retain their form even in
smaller point sizes