To be honest, this reading was very dense and technical to me - which makes sense considering it was a thesis. I’m not sure what Small’s technical background was, but I surmise it was not rooted in art/design, but rather in computer science, which made his conversation around filtering especially confusing because even though I have some knowledge of filtering in the CS sense, I couldn’t really understand the differences in the technique behind how the different filters were generated, what it meant to “save disk space” (like disk space in terms of generating type even a concern nowadays), etc.

This reading also confused me, because in the beginning, the background and the introduction, Small focused a lot on how typography is to be used to express ideas and emotion, and that by using computers to create type, the main benefit is having that type no longer be static, but dynamic and able to react to its environment, whatever its creator wants it to do. It makes type not permanent, but everchanging. however, none of the techniques Small talks about are focused on achieving this (except perhaps in “sound” and in “keyboard type control”). “Sound” to me however is widely ineffective still today, because people rarely have sound on when they are in most settings other than leisure. Apple, which is an example Small uses, has very specific sounds, such as to iMessages sending, or the fake keyboard typing, but most people turn those sounds off on their devices, 99% of the time they are using them.