Dido forever.
3
It is unfortunate the NY Times didn't interview any women for this article, despite many who organize and attend TypeThursdays (and similar events) around the world. Historically, women have not been recognized for their contributions to type design and typography and it's a shame when articles about current practice don't make mention of the women working in the industry today. Alphabettes.org is a good place to start.
124
Love/hate fonts. Well, mostly love em. Thanks to those who create these beautiful designs.
12
As a publisher/editor of high-end institutional editorial products in three continents AND a certified typography nerd, I'm happy to read this. In the Netherlands, one production designer always sent me a bottle of Glenlivet whisky to soften me up.
12
btw, typography is an art form that has never gone away. It is not a social occasion.
6
Lovers of fonts and unusual scripts, from Mayan through Glagolitic, may be aware of using then by typing in the browser
"[Language name] keyboard online". This, coupled with a copy of Latin-Other language alphabet, allows one to type names in weird tongues. Fun.
5
"Freedom of Choice is what you've got.
Freedom from choice is what you want."
- DEVO, "Freedom of Choice"
I miss the days of typewriters.
Now, with so many fonts and the end-user can control what fonts they want to see, the writer on the web cannot control formatting. This can affect art or work products. For instance, I use such a system in my work, yet others complain that the formatting is off. "Yes, it's off because you are using a different font! Use my font and it will be fine." "But I don't want to use that font..." OMG, what a waste of time and money.
Believe it or not, I am on the hunt for a font like is Moby Dick to my Captain Ahab.
I want the ultimate coding / word processing font for both text and equations and I cannot find a system that satisfies this. Microsoft certainly doesn't care with Word since you are stuck with their font, Cambria Math (yes, I'm a hypocrit), but their font is not satisfactory for other reasons.
Basically, I want a font that is:
1. Sans serif
2. Monospaced (like in the days of typewriters)
3. Has a slashed 0
4. Has a distinctly different number 1 from small l ("ell") that doesn't look like a capital I ("eye").
5. Can be used in a mathematics generation program such as MathType.
I suspect I am doomed.
38
Typophiles, unite!! Wish the gatherings weren't just in large cities, although that makes sense. Maybe one day ... A shout out to calligraphers and letterers too! ♥
17
The font for the London transportation system is the best thing in the world. I have a crush on it.
24
This article would have been a lot more fun if it were interspersed with examples of the fonts being described
92
When I was young no one understood my obsession with fonts. I taped logos and typefaces all over my bedroom walls. I would spend hours studying them at the library. It definitely did not appear ‘normal’ within my working class upbringing and then I discovered Neville Brody. Amen!
17
I love it when a book includes a colophon telling what typeface(s) were used . . . when I've put together books I always try to insist that we include a "word about the type" and usually manage to get something in despite resistance . . . I was and remain absolutely delighted with the website of the Baltimore Museum of Art which has a Colophon link at the bottom of their pages.
33
"Typography passes for being invisible." The best typography IS invisible. The reader consumes the information and feels good and they don't know why. The type has worked its magic.
23
The spirits of my esteemed friends & colleagues Doyald Young and Leah Hoffmitz are with me tonight as I read this article. Oh, how I miss you!
4
Intrigued when wife to be reading a hefty publication comprised of only fonts. "What's it all about?," I asked curiously. "White-Space," she replied. And so it is.
43
An entertaining, informative article.
Thank you.
It brought back an iconic moment with brilliant designer Eddie Opara -- a man with 151-proof opinions about typefaces -- who memorably tossed off, "Times New Roman is where great ideas go to die," to me during a working session. I doubt this is why the NY Times migrated to Georgia.
7
in Imperial - and not times new roman? heresy!
9
@linh I see the main article in Times New Roman and the Comments in Imperial in Firefox on my Apple. Curiouser and curiouser.
7
The font used in Massimo Vignelli’s design manual for the NYC subway is Standard not Helvetica. Many of his original enamel signs survive. Sadly, Standard was not “standard” in early digital sign shops so the MTA made the decision to switch to Helvetica. I personally think Standard looks better and is more legible in a wayfinding situation. Just sayin.
19
An engineer, I took a combined metal shop, wood shop, drafting, and print shop. Years later I worked in the trade press and software documentation. Every scrap of typography information was useful. Looking at sales brochure yesterday, every single paragraph had errors: variable paragraph alignment & spacing, missing lines in tables (too many types of shading), and the corporate name logo had the worst kerning I’ve seen in years. Initial character had at least 14 point spacing. Ending characters had between 4 and 6 (it was a serif font). So ugly I did not read it.
24
@Still here Sorry, I lied. Waiting for my meal, I played the “kiddie” game: How many mistakes can you find? I was amused for several minutes, then food arrived.
4
If you enjoy fonts, typefaces, wordplay, etc., you'll probably enjoy checking out John Langdon's website.
7
Fonts have mattered to me all my life, and with 24 years in advertising in New York, I got a chance to integrate it into my profession.
One thing I loved about the advent of the computer was that the ordinary person got exposure to different fonts and learned at least a handful of them. As horrified as I am when I see an Android with Comic Sans selected, I'm still pleased that people are evaluating options and making choices rather than simply not knowing or caring.
13
I have a lasting affection for WIREDbaum, a creation of Matthew Carter for WIRED mag. It is/was the most readable font. When WIRED got a new art director, he canned it and Conde Nast has had it locked up since. Can't buy it, can't even see it unless you go to a WIRED archive.
6
Personal favorite — the Windsor ampersand. I am neither a designer nor artist. Just a type lover.
8
Font geeks! Love it! I'm a Garamond gal myself but do most of my work these days in Calibri. I too started my journalism career in the days of metal type. Although I mourn that era for many reasons, I admit to being giddy with delight at being able test drive fonts and point sizes with a click.
Has anyone seen "Dead Hardy" - an homage to tattoo artist Ed Hardy? It is beautiful. And isn't wonderful that new fonts are still being created?
Thank you for this interesting upbeat article.
36
I fell in typographical love in the mid-60s, shoveling galleys of lead slugs for remelting and pouring the molten lead into shiny pigs and stacking them alongside a dozen linotype machines in my father's shop in the shadows of the Brooklyn bridge. I moved into photo/computer typographgy, working with so many talented graphic designers, spending hours talking type. Leaning from Les Segal, Lubalin, Peckolick, PDR, Kim Baer and so many others with differing thoughts about this cornerstone of communication. A great craft. A great art. My favorite font . . . Goudy OS (especially those diamond shaped dots). My favorite letter--lowercase "b" in Cooper Black.
40
@Bob Typo! “LeaRning from Les ...”
;-)
6
I adore typography. To me, it is the last outpost of commercial design, which is also one of my favorites. It also happens to lie outside of copyright, and as a professor of copyright law, it is my favorite example to give my students to question the need of copyright. Copyright, some other experts say, is necessary to motivate the production of art. But I then ask what of typography? Most of them know little more of typography except that it cannot be copyrighted. But others, like me, know that typography, despite a lack of copyright (or those who are very profound thinkers might say because of that gap), know that typography is an amazingly flourishing art form that produces tons of work product constantly. Long live typography (and it will unless Disney gets a piece of it)!
29
What a pleasure to find a discussion of typography in a mainstream newspaper – and such a wide spectrum of responses!
Type design captured my attention from my first involvement with handsetting metal type and printing from it as a schoolboy, over 60 years ago.
In a small city in the southern hemisphere, finding quality typefaces was almost impossible. The belated appearance of Helvetica & Times New Roman was so exciting! (hard to imagine?)
To get a font of 11pt Plantin, I had to import it from the other side of the world.
Plantin is still a favourite, along with other oldstyle and Transitional faces: Bembo, Garamond, Baskerville, and many excellent recent designs using the same principles. They are so relaxing and easy to read.
There seems to be a confusion in contemporary website design between simplicity of letterform, and legibility. For ease of reading, blocks of text should never be set in San Serif faces.
25
I love Bookman Old Style.
All my books (except for that unfortunate, traditionally published first book) are in Bookman Old Style, as are my clients' books. I'll do something different for photo captions and chapter starts, but for a legible, happy text font, Bookman Old Style gets my vote!
21
@lizinsarasota - I am with you there, Ms Liz. Bookman Old Style is my favorite, too.
5
During my life as an Art teacher in high school, part of my program involved year a more instruction (to students that elected to do so) in Calligraphy and Illustration. In the 80's and 90's tattoo shops were making a roaring comeback. A few of my students went on to become tattoo artists and within a few years were making more money annually then I ever earned on a teacher's salary. Who knew skin would rival parchment and illustration board as a working surface. Long retired now but I still exercise my pens, bristle brushes and airbrushes when I feel the need. There is nothing like the real thing.
22
My father was a newspaper writer, and as a child I loved being permitted to stand by one of the Linotype operators as the day's news was set. At about age 8, I discovered a book in my school library. I believe the name was "Type". I loved reading every word. More than 30 years later I was in the waiting room of a clinic, and the book was in the pile of outdated magazines. I read it cover-to-cover in no time, and wish I could find the book again. I am 72 now, and that back has had a great impact on my life!
22
I suspect that because of style, circumstance, that western languages are phonetic, and because of the population base, we are blessed with a huge variety of typefaces to enjoy in all aspects of life. I want to acknowledge Massimo Vignelli as a promoter of clean, legible typefaces. I am thankful and appreciative that there are many designers who devote whole careers to creation of typefaces. Theirs is serious work. I am also thankful for publishers who describe the choice of typeface in a note at the end of a book.
The choice of typeface is not trivial. For PowerPoint presentations in meetings, legibility is often ignored, and audiences in meetings can be found straining to read a font too small, too compressed, and without suitable contrast from its background. The US military has a special unit devoted to interpretation of visual data, and they have rules about choices of typeface and font aimed to prevent misinterpretation.
For routine communication, my choice is Arial, but for elegant matters, I choose Paladino.
20
Boomer here. Past journalist who can recall the cut-and-paste layout era. It is a matter of some pride to catch typeface and point size errors, when the rest of my professional team--all younger, all less sensitive to things that were standard knowledge, once upon a time--blows right past them.
46
@K Yates oh my goodness. Cut and paste layout era. It was part of my life in the late 60’s and early 70’s. I can still wield an X-Acto knife with no problem. This article surely takes me back, who knew. Wonderful
23
"Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes."
This James Joyce quote illustrates a nearly self-aware quality of this stuff we look at all day, these blocks of text. Marching to different drummers every time they appear, they serve as a resilient bedrock for our civilization. We honor them by making them glow on the page.
30
Yes, an article about fonts in the NYT - most welcomed! More, please.
Drawn my own fonts since I was a teenager and learning more about how they are created and the people behind them is a hobby.
For those like-minded font lovers, I highly recommend the Netflix design series "Abstract" - especially the episode featuring font-creating leader Jonathan Hoefler. Great stuff!
40
The merit of a font is its ease of reading, without ambiguity.
Computer Modern Roman is good. So are many others. Trying to be "artsy" or "cute" (fake cursive, etc.) are bad.
14
I'm not a graphic designer so am completely ignorant about all the ins and outs here, but I appreciate beautiful fonts and the work that goes into them. I'm partial to serifs myself and find that they make reading easier. I think Georgia, Garamond, Imperial, and Baskerville are quite elegant.
23
This is an area of design that is over-due for thought about accessibility.
Dyslexics, 1 in 5 people, frequently have trouble with mirror imaged letters. Their brains (my brain, my daughter's brain) struggle in reading letters that are overly identical and in reading large blocks of text. b,d,p,q are absolutely identical in many fonts. And guess what (horrors of horrors!) 2 spaces after a period help too.
If you want to stop people from turning off your pretty font and using the more dyslexic friendly Comic Sans, think about accessibility. We don't need hand holding like the dyslexi font, we need actual good design that takes into account everyone's needs and not just the purists in the room.
29
@Jen Hi Jen, Thomas Jockin here, founder of TypeThursday and typeface designer. You sound like a user who would benefit from the font family Lexend. Lexend is a font that empirically improves reading proficiency that I designed with researcher Dr. Bonnie Shaver-Troup. Lexend was designed for print sensitive individuals with dyslexia like yourself and your child. You can learn more at http://www.lexend.com
24
@Jen - Thank you for the insight.
4
For me, favorites would include Gill Sans, Cheltenham, Caslon, Optima, Baskerville, Bookman, Goudy Old
Style, Benguiat to name a few.
Having been in printing and publishing for many years, I've seen both good and bad design in many things, but with printed and digital images surrounding us, good design always holds up.
15
Personally I'm interested in typographical white rivers and the infuence of fonts on them. Alert: I love them, but poets can have a different view than typographers who tend to hate them. For me they reveal justified prose in new ways. I'd appreciate advice from pros.
6
Hurray for Paul Shaw, his amazing type history books and a (printers) hats off to all the other type design wizards featured in this article. BTW, anyone can study and set metal and wood type with Paul this summer in Northern Italy from the enormous collection at TipoTeca. Just check out the Legacy of Letters website.
16
Very enjoyable article. Thank you.
9
Shout out to Massimo Vingelli (sp), the Godfather of font-as-brand, namely Bodoni.
12
I'm always on the lookout for a narrow font that can be used for a headline. The one I use most often at the moment is called Impact.
5
@Madeline Conant Have a look at Heroic Condensed. You might like the heavier weights.
3
I keep waiting for the full-bodied ball terminal to drip on the breathtaking finial.
24
Very enjoyable article. Thanks.
6
Someone needs to write a history about a mystery. The mystery? When and why did typefaces become "fonts?" Who done it? Who changed font from a variation of a typeface to, well, font? I'll bet it was Microsoft and that dirty Word writing thingy. Done in by programmers who had not a clue about typography. Find 'em. Book 'em. Convict 'em.
8
@Anna Font was originally the term for a specific distribution of metal type in one size and one face style. So if you bought a 15a font of Caslon 12 pt italic from the foundry, they sent you a little package of cast metal type with 15 lower case a's and all the other letters in that face and size by usage distribution, might be 20 e's and 3 x;s. You bought a bunch of font packages, set your type in wooden cases and began composing in metal. The word was too appealing though and it was stolen to mean typefaces not packages of cast metal type.
48
I wonder what percentage of these guys are on the spectrum :)
7
@Nate It takes all kinds, but there’s something to be said for obsessive attention to detail when creating type.
8
@Nate Not me!
2
Makes me want to start designing typefaces again!
3
As a lawyer, I try to pay attention to fonts, because I think that font selection is an element of the persuasiveness of a document. These days I mostly use Palatino Linotype, which I learned of when I read Hermann Zapf's obituary in the NY Times. Appeals courts often have rules regarding the font size and style. The First Circuit, for instance, requires a certification by counsel of both the word count and font selection. I took particular pleasure in the following citation I submitted:
Counsel hereby certifies that the brief herein contains 6386 words, mostly in English, though occasional use is made of Latin for the simulacrum of erudition. The typeface is 14 point Garamond, similar to that used in the “Harry Potter” novels with, one hopes, the same magical effect.
(we won)
82
@Peter
Judges (esp at the appellate level) can enjoy that humor. 35 years ago, I was editing an essay by RBG that quoted from a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, and I went to the music library to confirm the punctuation (it needed correcting) and cite the measure numbers (I was trained in music, what can I say). She expressed pointed written appreciation for the edit and citation.
29
@Peter - Typographic dynamism!
5
@Peter Matthew Butterick (the same quoted in this piece) has designed type with you in mind. typographyforlawyers.com
9
I see you're using the words "font" and "typeface" interchangeably. The purists are cringing!
14
My favorite "go-to" font -- ?
Times New Roman
Of course...
5
is there a bleacher section for fans at these events? sign me up.(see what I did there?)
11
Type designers are all one big font family.
9
more like this! Also, why did the Times switch from Georgia to Imperial in 2017? I am guessing that change occurred after intense debate....
11
@Bill R May have had something to do with broader industry support for webfonts across a significant majority of browsers.
3
Can we come together as font nerds and vote to permanently abolish comic sans?
11
Not until we convince type designers that the world has plenty of grunge fonts so don't design any more.
Seriously, I inherited Comic Sans as a heading font in a semi-pro bimonthly. I wanted to dump it, but it's still there. I haven't found anything that:
(a) Is lighthearted and amiable without drawing attention to its exciting newness. Edginess, go home!
(b) can become slightly wider or narrower (thanks to the wonders of OpenType) without making it look even more deformed than it already is.
(c) is reasonably legible at text sizes (10-13 point) as well as headline sizes.
If you or anybody else reading this has used a font that is as casual and non-threatening as Comic Sans and is legible from 10 to 44 points, I welcome your suggestions.
6
@Chester200 - It has its place. Its overuse that's the problem.
4
Look into Spumoni. It is lighthearted and fun but not comic sans.
1
For me, Century Schoolbook, something about this style reminds me of a 1893 single room schoolhouse.
5
I've emailed Microsoft to ask it to introduce glyphing management for Word. Glyphing management would allow the writer the option to convert letter combinations like fi, ae, st, and ffl to glyphs, digraphs, and ligatures (I'm not sure I can reproduce those here, so I won't try), but when you run spell-check Word would recognize the individual letters and not identify, e.g., the ffi glyph as some weird Unicode character. I've never gotten a response. If anyone has an in with Microsoft's Word department, please pass this request along.
10
@Cyclist This sort of glyph substitution is already somewhat accessible in Word, but you need to be using the right digital fonts with these ligature substitutions built into the font itself. But it sounds like you’d enjoy exploring other professional grade software for such exacting typographic decisions. Adobe InDesign is perhaps the most popular today.
7
@Cyclist I'm a lifer in the publishing gulag. And if it's any comfort, I've been joking for years that if there's an afterlife, Bill Gates and I are gonna have a long talk about those table tools in Word.
Great article! Great comments!
15
Thanks to both of you! I'll look into Adobe InDesign.
3
My favorite type? Busty Bold.
2
So is getting the type wrong used on the web page considered a font pa's. 😉
10
...and from this old fogey can we once and for all do away with hairline fonts, sometimes in gray spread wide on a white background.
19
@Sgt Schulz ...on a menu in a dimly lit restaurant. Yes, please!
6
A font of wisdom. Thank you.
12
This isn't about me, it's about one of the great Buddhas of Type design:
About 40 years ago I designed a logo for a newsletter that I was producing. "Paste-up" was done with paste in those days, "leading" was still sometimes done with lead. I showed my Headline logo to this gentleman who said plainly: "It's very pretty...but I'm afraid you know nothing about type design".
He then proceeded to explain, patiently and with kindness, about fifteen fundamental errors that I had made. He set Titles for a thousand Hollywood films, and reconstructed and restored hundreds of fonts which faced extinction.
His name was Dan Solo, he died in 2012 at about 85 years, and if anyone out there remembers him, please share a story.
42
I LOVED Dan Solo (and his “cast of characters) and used to order all sorts of headlines and special effects from him. Thanks for reminding me of him!
17
@Charlotte Ornett
I'm so glad there are others! Do you remember his voice on the phone? ("Hellooooo, SoooloType.") I believe he'd been a radio broadcaster, and that rich baritone was his natural sound. Cheers!
8
What is force-kern letter spacing?
4
@Diane - Kerning is when the spacing between letters is adjusted so that the letters will look more appealing - manually "forced" together or apart as opposed to merely typing out copy and leaving it as is. This can be done in hand-drawn typography, mechanical typesetting, or with digital programs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning
4
@Diane It’s how the Jedi typeset all their documents.
5
Comic Sans is the worst typeface ever :-)
4
Can we, as a society, please cancel Comic Sans?
6
Typography matters. It kills me to see all these headline sized quotes that are suppose to be so meaningful and spirtual all over the internet. Then, Whack! You see a non curly quote or apostrophe and the thing goes down the drain.
14
Any Comic Sans fans in the house? Zapf Chancery? Hello? Is this on?
7
cool!
2
The Times is set in Georgia? Why not, um, Times New Roman?
8
@drsophila
Wrong Times. It was the Times of London that had that font created for compressed reading to save newsprint.
It's awful as a reading experience.
There was a fair period of years where Georgia was considered among the best widely available (in terms of readers' own devices) online display typefaces.
5
@drsophila Times New Roman was designed for the Times of London, not the NY Times.
3
@drsophila This website was set in Times New Roman until 2007. But what’s in a name? Times New Roman is a digitization of the original type designed for The Times of London in 1929.
1
design for designers. matters only to the small,elite, anal-retentive mob headed by the flowing locks of Keedy.
to the world at large, there are more important issues...
1
@Chad - Perhaps you don't recognize good design when you see it, but most people recognize the lack of it.
16
@Chad Something we all struggle with in our tiny, meaningless lives: a crippling resentment of the inimitable Jeff K.
2
The era of the PC and inexpensive laser printer has revolutionized the availability of fonts. Now we have thousands available to us as individuals, for free or very little money. This is unlike the days when a few type "foundries" controlled the digital fonts and were mainly interested in licensing them at significant cost to large commercial prints shops and designers. I credit Apple as probably the first to break free of that restrictive marketing and aim at the desktop user.
10
@Dennis Driscoll - It's true that there are many free or cheap typefaces available online. However, you mainly get what you pay for. Many of those typefaces are amateurish-looking. Perhaps the creators will develop with experience in the future, but by then, you will be paying market value.
4
I'm a calligrapher, and we think about counters, negative space, and suiting the font (or "hand") to the message as much as typographers do. Are there any venues for calligraphers and type designers to meet up and learn from each other?
16
@Joan Passarelli I don’t know, but I bet the invitations and flyers would be beautiful!
7
@Joan Passarelli I recommend you start by contacting the Center for the Book in San Francisco, and the San Francisco Public Library’s Book Arts and Special Collections Department. Both host exhibitions and events of great interest to designers, calligraphers, typographers, bibliophiles, etc. These are your people.
3
@Joan Passarelli - Attend one of the referenced meetings and see what they have for you. At least look at their website.
3
Another request. Can we never again have fonts where upper case I , lower case l and one 1 can’t be or are hard to distinguish, likewise upper case O and 0. And if people give you codes of random letters and numbers you have to type in, can they never use these symbols.
107
@Sgt Schulz Agree completely. By the way, back in the eighteenth century, German books were still printed in Fraktur (or Gothic script). For modern eyes, this can seem a daunting prospect, but soon enough one gets used to it. Still, it can be hard to tell the difference between capital B and V, or capital K and R. I have seen "Vanessa" falsely transcribed as "Banessa." Since it was impossible to italicize Fraktur, typesetters added a space between letters instead.
4
@Sgt Schulz I once had the privilege of typesetting the financial pages of an annual report in Gill Sans. We ended up having to put a little hat on the number one in Fontographer.
9
@Sgt Schulz - Pet peeve identification!
5
Type lover from way back. I used to play with letraset stencils and to this day I love checking out signage and the way text is presented. I am just beginning my journey into font making in my mid 50s; currently working on my first font and loving everything about it. Better late than never.
49
2020 marks the 50th anniversary of International Typeface Corporation, the great digital typographic foundry, founded in 1970 in New York by Aaron Burns, Herb Lubalin and Edward Rondthaler. In 1995, I received (as all ITC typeface designers at that time) a 25th anniversary aluminum box. Long live typography and ITC typefaces!
32
@JR Cuaz - Hear, hear! May Avant Garde be forever etched into typographic history. U&LC magazine.
Ed Benguiat is still around too. The 70's had some juicy circus poster-like fonts.
10
As a child I’d go to my local hometown weekly after school a day or two a week. (My mother worked there part time.). While waiting for her to finish her day, I’d painstakingly copy letterforms from their typeface books. They had just converted to somewhat computerized type, but the headlines were still laid out by hand, cutting paper and pasting it onto blue-lined page layout paper. There was still a Linotype machine they used for non-newspaper offset printing jobs. This dropped hot metal characters one by one down a slot to create a line of metal type.
It was glorious.
81
Great article! To the person that designed 'verdana' - thank you! It is my absolute favourite because it is easy to read, soft on the eyes, and makes beautiful use of white space.
28
Mathew Carter designed Verdana :)
7
@Megan You must absolutely love your trips to IKEA!
3
I became enamored with fonts when I became an editor of my high school yearbook. An architecture degree and 40 years of design, specification, graphics, signage, and construction have only made my font fascination grow. When architectural drawings move into early AutoCad, we dedicated significant computer memory and document file size maintaining our company logo typeface in the .dwg workspace and making all the drawing notes in a font that emulated hand drawn lettering. I would be in way over my head at such a gathering of type designers but it would be fascinating to watch others who are experts at the object of my mere fandom.
26
I find the vast majority of typefaces posted on free download sites to be incompetent in design, not only in consistency but most of all in uneven spacing of characters, and missing punctuation or symbols, which renders them unusable. There needs to be better training or regulation. Meanwhile, it's very difficult to find any legitimately Art Deco fonts, most of which are Art Nouveau and not Moderne.
I became a decades-long user of Aim toothpaste, not only because it was the first gel toothpaste, but because they had a special typeface designed for the name, one that was eye-catching and contemporary.
16
@Pank
If you liked Aim, you must love “FedEx.” Look for the arrowhead in the lettering on any of their products. Once you see it, you’ll never be able to unsee it.
4
@Pank — And why WOULD you expect great features on a product you don't pay anything for? Live big, and download a typeface from a NOT-free site. A professionally designed and executed font is produced by professionals, which by definition means that they get paid. P.S.: Optima forever!
13
@Eli Uncyk - I read where children who cannot yet read see the arrow right off the bat. Once they become proficient readers, the arrow becomes invisible, like to us grown-ups.
Graphic designers who are younger than 40 (in other words, designers who have always worked on a computer), should take a class in typography. The history of typography is fascinating. And learning how to SPEC type is valuable skill that teaches you to respect an art form that everyone lives with every day.
78
@Acey I've been in the biz for over 40 years and there are some things I miss, but spec'ing type isn't one of them!
4
@Acey What schools or courses do you recommend? So far, I've been trying to learn everything from books or online.
4
@Acey - I also think that learning to use pens, brushes, and ink gives an immediacy and competency that digital design doesn't provide.
10
Don't laugh at the seriousness of this. Steve Jobs took a class from a Trappist Monk saying “I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to [learn calligraphy]. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful. Historical. Artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture. And I found it fascinating. None of this had any hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. " BTW, the Mac would not have been a success without this and there goes Apple.
162
@JEM - That's a lovely story. Thank you for posting it.
10
And then there's the battle of the Quark vs InDesign users for the ability to manipulate type. I was a diehard Quark user until my computer repair guy convinced me to try InDesign. I am in the process of recreating all of my files, and will never go back.
22
My favorite font? Titillium, a sans-serif at once smooth and chiseled. It is mine of choice for the KDE/Plasma UI, and that of games as varied as the Pioneer space sim and F1 2019.
My most loathed fonts? Helvetica's and Arial's "Black" variants, and Ms Mincho's Latin glyphs. The latter seemed to have taken great EFFORT to get so horribly shaped and kerned—they're an absent stare in typographical form.
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@SR ewwww!
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As a graphic designer in a previous life, I particularly like full-bodied terminals, especially ones displaying notes of sassafras and quince.
Seriously, I can appreciate the love of—and obsession with—typography. I've had my favorites over the years. And, like the rest of you, I'm bothered when I see signage with an unnecessary apostrophe or really bad kerning.
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@day owl One of my pet peeves, in addition to yours—restaurant menus that try to be “creative” to the point they’re unreadable. So many instances of type abuse! And to add insult to injury, printed in a highly screened ink to make it nearly impossible to read in a dimly lighted restaurant. Who approves these things??!
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I have been reading quite a lot about font design in the transition from manuscript to print culture. Just the idea of defining how a letter should be and how it should not be when print came out it's fascinating.
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These guys sounds like my kind of people! (I am a graphic designer too)
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Typography is an art form. For old school graphic designers and typesetters, the computer was a disaster (in the beginning) because algorithms controlled the kerning of type. Typesetters were craftsmen -- each letter and its distance from the next was a critical part of the display of the headline. The algorithms got better over time, but people who care about htese things still have to force-kern letter spacing. There are thousands of new typefaces but I personally like some of the old standbys like Garamond, Helvetica, Futura, and a handful of others.
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@Tom J
Me too. I am not a designer, but I like to read (and appreciate the difference between reading online and reading hard copy, and the aptness of a given font for one vs the other medium). When I had the opportunity to recommend revisions to a major law school journal ~35+ years ago, my recommendation to replace Times Roman with Baskerville was accepted and so well received by grateful readers that it's remained in use to this day.
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@Karl : Me three. I'm a lawyer as well, and I absolutely hate Times New Roman, which is, unfortunately, the legal profession's default font. I love a brief written in Garamond, which is so much softer and easier on a lawyer's (or judge's) tired eyes.
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@Rupert
I converted all of my financial service firms contractual and procedural documentation that I can influence into Garamond, with good line and paragraph spacing. I want people to not have to fight to read, understand and ask questions/provide comments on these things. Good document visual design says "yes, we want to work together with you, not slip one over on you." (Likewise, this accompanies the substance of standard terms - we don't ask what we would be offended to be asked, as it were.) Times Roman should be put out of our collective misery.
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