It's interesting to see just how finely tuned it was to practicality and technological constraints rather than an artistic aesthetic. Those constraints have relaxed enough that we are more free to explore beautiful typography now.
I've been using Lucida Console as coding font for the past 15 years, due to its great readability at 9 pt (i.e. 12 pixels line height, though nowadays I add two additional pixels of line spacing). Still haven't found a better replacement.
I like Lucida Console, but I usually use Lucida Sans Typewriter[1] as my editor font. It's a bit taller and skinnier than Lucida Console, and works well with a line-height of about 1.2.
Agreed, digital typography was far more constrained back in the day. You couldn't even embed a ttf font into a web page until recently, and the intersection of Mac and Windows default fonts was like 4 fonts. Even in images, the low dpi made it impossible to use fonts with fine details.
There was some interesting article a few years back. It stated that web design had come to rely more on snazzy layouts and images to compensate for ugly type, whereas print design often is fairly minimal and lets the letterforms dominate. Now those constraints are lifted, the article argued that web designers should adopt a more typography-centric style.
> Now those constraints are lifted, the article argued that web designers should adopt a more typography-centric style.
Constraints might be lifted but web fonts are downloaded on a per page/site basis. If that font has fifty languages and many unicodes then it is bloat or with characters falling back to a system font.
Given that some fonts haven't changed since 1066 then it seems a bit silly to check with the server on a per page basis if the fonts have been a) licensed and b) updated lately.
A benevolent dictator is needed, e.g. the E.U., to mandate some means of insisting that a good selection of fonts are baked into every device for citizens to be able to read government published stuff in order to solve this. Or maybe the holy blockchain could solve it so that font creators get paid properly for font usage. (I jest about being able to pay font foundries with this alternative licensing model).
> It's interesting to see just how finely tuned it was to practicality and technological constraints rather than an artistic aesthetic.
As I understand the entomology of the word, that's literally "technique". As you note, this can change over time as mediums evolve, but a major aspect of creators' work is working and innovating within the technological constraints of a medium.
Though interestingly, a lot of the solutions they arrived at are also generally seen as a good foundation for even printed letterforms (or other high fidelity formats) when the goal is readability.
One of the forever useable font family. Despite being quite so old and yet modern till date.
Alot of the designs created by us utilizes lucida as well as fonts inspired by lucida. Over the decade, we've experienced wide acceptance of lucida font family by our subscribers.
