The Periodic Table of Typefaces, designed by Cam Wilde.
Have you ever paused, while working on your word processor, before the choice of fonts available to compose your text in? It happens to me all the time. Each typeface, I feel, communicates a different vibe. It must be selected carefully, because it has to concord with the content of the text, in order to underline its meaning. You’re writing something anonymous, efficient, short, modern, and probably meant to read on screen: pick Helvetica. Something classic, ornate, and refined, which will be printed on faux-yellowed paper: Monotype Corsiva. Something long, literary, thrilling, and probably fictitious: Baskerville. Something innocent, fun, short, and a little childish: Comic Sans. Something plain, factual, long, and serious: Times New Roman. It’s important to choose the right typeface in order to convey the right message. You don’t want to print out your wedding invitations in Papyrus (which, by the way, is one of the fonts I hate the most, and still crops up in various places, despite its ugliness—it was even used for the title and subtitles of the film Avatar).
There are other questions that come to mind. Who designed these fonts? How do you design a font? How old are they? Which is the most common? Which fonts read better? Which font did Gutenberg use? In search of answers to questions like these, I recently developed an interest in typefaces: their design, their history, their uses. Luckily, there are lots of places to find answers. The first is a fine little book, published in 2010: Just my Type: A Book About Fonts, by Simon Garfield. This book is the perfect introduction to the world of typography. Its chapters go through the history and basics of type design, and are separated by smaller chapters on specific types, such as Albertus (used on the classic Faber and Faber covers) and Bodoni, an elegant font which was used on the cover of Vanity Fair for their special feature on Tiger Woods. The book evades the more serious technicalities of typography, but offers a fun overview of the subject. It is especially entertaining when dealing with the dark side of type design, such as the ongoing war between Helvetica, usually judged to be one of the most perfect typefaces ever created, and its clone, Arial (the rivalry is hilariously illustrated in this YouTube video). Another quirky bit of typographical trivia: a pangram is a phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet, and is therefore ideal to show all the letters of a given font; the most popular pangram currently in use by type designers is the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog (although, of course, it isn’t a perfect pangram because it repeats letters).
Where Just My Type looses a few points (pun intended) is in its failure to properly celebrate the typefaces; instead, it dwells on everything that has to do with them. It’s a little too loud. Luckily, there are other books that offer a softer take on the subject. G. gave me one of them for my birthday: Letter Fountain. It’s a hefty volume, published by Taschen—a great publishing house for everything artistic—that is entirely devoted to the design of typefaces. It begins with an overview of the history of writing, printing, and the development of typography, then it organizes typefaces into their different families, and finally gives a large number of individual typefaces their own pages, complete with a brief history and description, an example of each letter and symbol, as well as an overview of its different variants (bold, italics, etc.) and sizes. Letter Fountain is a celebration of design and aesthetic pleasure: it’s a beautiful book that showcases the beauty of typefaces by letting them speak for themselves (which makes sense, considering that’s what they’re designed to do). It also includes cool features, like three ribbon bookmarks, a ruler and conversion chart for font-sizes, and an appendix that includes a glossary, four different indexes, and a timeline of a timeline of type founders. It’s impressive, and a little excessive.
Naturally, typography, is inseparable from books. Without efficient, beautiful, and readable letters, there would be no books. I’ve always loved when there’s a little note on the type at the back of a book, detailing what font it’s set in, why, and what the history of the typeface is. For example, the volumes in the Everyman’s Library are set in Caslon, which, the triangular note on the last page tells us, “put a stop to the importation of Dutch types” when it was created in England in the 18th century, “and so changed the history of English typecutting.” Type design is serious stuff. More specifically, typefaces are also inseparable from cover design. A lot of book covers are made several times better or worse because of the font they use to spell out the title of the book and the author’s name. Sometimes, letters are the only thing used on a book cover. I’m thinking of the works of JD Salinger, who demanded that the covers of his books be entirely bare except for his name and the title of the book. That means Penguin had to get creative in their use of fonts when they republished Salinger’s work a few years ago for the UK market. They commissioned a type designer, Seb Lester, to do the job. The result is stunning:
So what’s the next step for the new typography fanatic in me? There are other books to get, even more hefty and complete than Letter Fountain, if you can believe it. For example, the ultimate reference in typeface remains the FontBook, aka “the big yellow book,” which calls itself “the most complete digital type reference in the world.” There’s also Giambattista Bodoni’s beautiful Manual of Typography, an 1818 Italian masterwork on typography, reprinted by Taschen in a luxurious two-volume set (pictures bellow). But before I spend that much money to look at pretty letters, I’ll begin by watching Helvetica, a 2007 film about the proliferation of one of the world’s most common typefaces. It’s probably going to change the way I see the world; that’s how important type is.
