This anthology of 14 papers by 21 authors, including the two editors, focuses on the interaction of vision and type design.

The first section features the problem of designing type for visually impaired readers, including a report on Matilda, a typeface for children with low vision.

Section 2 brings science to reading with studies of the scientific design of a new typeface, the promise of eye-tracking studies and their general inadequacy in addressing issues of typography, design for distance reading (important for highway signs), and the differences in interword spacing in Chinese for child readers.

Section 3 focuses on type design practices, with a survey of Chinese typeface design, the methodology of adjustment of type to choice of media, a retrospective on “harmonised type design,” and an application of pattern languages to typographic design. The third applies the experience of Bigelow and Holmes in creating Lucida Sans Unicode, the first attempt to unify typefaces across several writing systems. The author explores Arabic and English, plus Thai, Chinese, and English in print and in public signage. The fourth paper relies on the pattern language concepts of architect Christopher Alexander to describe the design of newspaper typefaces.

Section 4 approaches real-life applications. Both of the editors’ contributions are in this section. The first paper studies the perception of Latin and Chinese characters depending on familiarity with type designing and on fluency with the language. The second contributor describes the experience of redesigning type for a newspaper in English and another in Arabic, a language she does not know. The third survey focuses on semantic differentiation of typefaces. The final chapter returns again to Arabic typeface design challenges, this time on iPads.

Two notable principles in this collection require comment.

1. Legibility is not the same as readability. This may be true and useful, but it is hard to discern the characterizations that make it so. Indeed, most of the authors seem to use the terms interchangeably.

The answer to the first principle may lie in appreciation of the second.

2. A (good/great/superlative) typeface is a beautiful collection of letters, not a collection of beautiful letters. In particular, a so-called Frankenfont made, for example, by selecting a favorite letter from one typeface after another, may provide very distinctive letters (improving local legibility), but the readability of words using the Frankenfont is severely reduced. This extreme case underlines the observation that coherence in a typeface depends on many separate and sometimes difficult to harmonize requirements, desires, applications, and preferences.

In summary, this is a quite readable book mainly of interest to experts appreciating the interaction among type design principles and practice on the one hand, and efforts to improve readability for diverse groups of readers on the other. While the focus is definitely on digital implementations, there are many broader lessons as well.