On 2013-03-06 01:17 , Guillermo Espertino (Gez) wrote:
As a designer (and I think every designer out there will agree, specially type designers) I'm against those faux styles. They're never good, and they can lead the unaware designer to think that certain typeface has a bold or italic variant. ... Faux italics shouldn't exist at all. Slanting a font is a crime, italics are never the regular glyphs slanted, it's a completely different set of characters, designed from scratch.
Gez
... and the rest of Gez' post... Gez said it right, in my opinion.
And not only that faux italic shouldn't exist at al. faux small caps, faux variation in thickness, faux oldstyle numerals... faux leather, too ;) Rudimentary typographic variations (regular, bold, italic, bolditalic) are but slightly misleading atavisms of early computer type implementations. I don't know the history well enough, but I imagine that the technical (in)capabilities of that age and typographic ineptitude of digital forefathers had to do something with it. For example, dot matrix printers did faux thingy magnificently. With dot fonts. Those faux bold letters looked so natural! :)
(un)fortunately, those days are gone and we can (or should?) accept and enjoy again the values of well made typography. One of the first steps in teaching the students typography these days is to covertly and gently (or not) undo the dogma that every typeface comes in as a holy tetrad of regular, italic, bold, bolditalic. Not all fonts have to conform to this.
As it was said already in this thread, when that artsy/trendy/trashy faux-whatever type form is needed for effect, the existing tools are more than fitting.
alex