Hi, my name is HotMicks and I too suffer from Typomania!
(and btw, the "giggle" font is probably American Typewriter, Times New Roman or some such font
)
Anyway, loved the read,
Red. Thanks. I spend so much time deliberating font choices for my job, it's ridiculous. I was lucky to have once worked with an art director who was excellent with type (she had previously worked for a book publisher designing book jackets) and I learned a lot from her. Last spring, I had to come up with a whole new brand and I think the designer and I spent two days just looking for, and narrowing the choices, of what font to use. It is an art form. You have to think of every possible use in the future - something I learned the hard way when we once picked a font that worked well for display pieces, but we couldn't get it anywhere near legible when we then had to put it on a 2" button.
Yesterday I had to design a logo for an email campaign we're starting tomorrow and I think I spent an hour trying to choose fonts that would help convey strength, urgency, hope and the fact that it's about the upcoming election. Here, you can be my betas (
)... what do you think? Did I get that across? Lemme know before tomorrow, 'kay?
Anyway, I can't believe that chick got fired over that (and glad she won on appeal). Most of the terminology and history of the fonts was stuff I already knew because of my occupation, but the paragraphs about the designers at the bottom were fascinating. First, now I know why I never liked gill sans (and here I always thought it was because of that dopey "swoop" curve underneath the dot on the "i"... but
ewwwww, what was with that guy?!?). And the Hammersmith Bridge story just totally cracked me up. Wonder if anyone ever found any of those pieces.
I have actually seen the old "wood" racks for fonts (and the metal font blocks). One of the printers we used to use had preserved their "foundry" and it was amazing to see how labor-intensive that process was. Of course, when I very first got into this line of work, we still had to "compose" the type on typesetting equipment (very expensive equipment, I might add) and print out galleys, which were printed on special - also expensive - slick paper. (Because we are a non-profit, we're a little behind the times in terms of adopting new technology.) We only had four fonts then, because they were so expensive to buy for the compositor. It's also one of the reasons I hate gill sans - it was the one they used the most and I just got tired of looking at it. But I'm glad I had that experience, because with each change being so costly, it taught me to be extra careful about proofing and changing my mind about the wording.
One of my favorite art exhibits at SFMOMA (our modern art museum) is The Art of Design. The exhibit contains type design, signage design, icon design and other types of graphic design. There's a huge section on Scandinavian graphic design, which I
love. Anyway, enough Typomania for today!
that was a really interesting article, Red! I'm a bit of a Bookman and Garamond fan... yeah, I'm a bit of a serif-lover. But Helvetica is a beautiful font.