In reply to Semi Serif typefaces:
Great topic. (I think General Discussion is a fine place.)
It's always up to the designer. :-) But I can think of three -potentially combinable- approaches: what turns the designer on, æsthetically; what chirography (which sort of means handwriting) likes to see, mostly head serifs on the left and foot serifs on the right; and what presumably increases readability by differentiating boumas (shapes of clusters of letters, often whole words). This last one is my favorite, but I have to admit it applies best to text font; for display fonts the second can work better, or the first if the font's intent is to be idiosyncratic.
According to its designer the serifs in Rotis Semi-Serif was designed with readability-amplification in mind. Which does not mean it works to that effect - but at least it tries hard, which is more than can be said for most semi-serif designs.
hhp
