Jan 13th 2012 10:40
Indra Kupferschmid (DE)
2. Micro-Classification or tagging A possible solution to this problem and another approach I grew very fond of in the last 2 years is the micro-classification you can call tagging. It is at first a non hierarchical approach, which makes it far more flexible and user-centred, often even user generated. You could call a it a democratic take on classification. If people regard this typeface as “holiday” or “girlish”, then why not have them find the typeface with those keywords. The problem with keywords added by users, or also marketing people, though is monitoring. I did this voluntarily for MyFonts in the past 2 years extensively (besides tagging typefaces) and was just stunned at times by the silly and ridiculous tags that were occasionally added to fonts. Tagging of course works more or less only in a (interactive) database environment. The most consequent example for it might be the MyFonts website, but also other type vendors work with a similar system more or less successfully. Here, the browsing or search interface is crucial, as you see in the example of fonts.com with its confusing list of keywords. What is most confusing here, on a page they call “classification”, are keywords like “serif” or “script” or “simplified chinese” next to “scary” on the same level. In my opinion, it is key to also offer tags in a basic hierarchical order as an entry point to all those different styles of typefaces. In my opinion there are different “levels” of keywords. Is “serif” a more weighty ones than “holiday”? Speaking to manufacturers though I got an additional view. Some told me that sales went up significantly after they added more tags, and more informal tags that is. So, what should you do when you see that people find the typefaces they want this way. Should you force educate them, force your classification on everyone if it is maybe not even helpful to them?
A failed research
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As I am busy with this topic for 14 years now and get really desperate at times. I can understand why my predecessors did not want to bother further at some point and the discussion is preferably avoided at conferences. Although I had intensive experience from teaching and earlier tests I was hoping to find some new starting points in a small research. What are the more “weighty” characteristics? How do people differentiate typefaces? Well, that was not as fruitful as I though and just brought up what I already knew or suspected. I confronted students and friends of different level of knowledge with a pile of type samples and let them sort them into groups however they wanted. After that I asked them to assign names to their groups. To break you the most disappointing