From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Thu May 08 2003 - 14:11:00 EDT
Edward H Trager wrote on 05/08/2003 11:13:32 AM:
> Doesn't everyone have an inflated sense of his own creativity? ;-)
I think John inappropriately confused creativity and talent, or creativity
and innovation (I'll explain below what I mean).
Wm says he was exercising his creativity. I think that has to be measured
against the individual and their own creative history, and I don't think
anyone else can judge whether or not William was creative in this case
(except perhaps someone familiar with his creative history in related areas
to know whether he was simply regurgitating previous efforts).
At the same time, William's response to John, asserting his creativity,
mentioned only items that had to do with engineering and not aesthetics.
For instance, "The use of the U+E700 STAFF character to set the height
precisely is another" -- he created a solution to some problem (though I
don't know what the problem is) as an engineer would. That struck me. I
don't think I've seen any real acknowledgement on William's part of the
artistic and aesthetic issues, and that is what John is critiquing, I
think. (Well, John did also comment on failure to use procedures that lead
to bug-free fonts, but I think his strongest criticism relates to
typography.) Even here, I don't know that John can say William was being
artistically uncreative -- again, that's something that should be measured
against the individual alone. But, John *can* say his work wasn't
typographically innovative -- a measure against the entire community of
type designers; and I think John is also qualified to say that Wm's font
doesn't reflect significant talent as a type designer. (Please note: there
is a difference between having typographic talent as a type designer and
having technical skills needed to create fonts. There are probably lots of
engineers who can build fonts but that don't have a lot of type design
talent.)
So, I'd say William is the best judge as to whether he was being creative
and whether he has a fair assessment of his creativity. I'd say that others
can fairly judge the extent to which he was innovative and the merits of
his innovations, and can judge the extent of his talents as an innovator
and type designer (of course, such critique should always be done with some
sensitivity and politeness). I'd say he was being technically innovative,
though the merits of those innovations and his talent as a technical
innovator is another question (on which I will not comment at the moment --
if he answers my question on the problem that his STAFF character is
supposed to be solving, I might have comments to offer on the merits of
that innovation). As for whether he was being innovative or demonstrating
talent in relation to typography, I'll defer to people like John who are
much better qualified to comment on this than I.
- Peter
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Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
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