Pick a Typeface, Any Typeface


I prefer my own handwriting, partially because I will be able to be a scribe and produce beautiful calligraphy; that is of course when the entire civilzation has horrible handwriting because schools and business force everything to be typed, due to legibility. Guess what, who out there did not know that someone creates, and our designs the typefaces we use on our taken for granted computer screens. Just as someone spends hundreds of hours writing code so that our computers can function, someone out there is spending hundreds of hours creating type. This process started around the time of the first printing press, hundreds of years ago. Then the form transfered to typewriters, and now to computers. The process and art is so far diluded, that I doubt people even give a thought to the process of what makes a type face or "font."

We can use this to begin to think about what happens, "A geometric sans wouldn't have been legible enough at very small sizes and on bad paper, and a serif was not acceptable for cultural reasons. So I gave the letters little pseudo-serifs, which also opened the potential ink-traps between down strokes and curves. These little swerves guide the eye along the top of the x-height, where most differentiation occurs." And what he forgot to mention is to mind your "p's" and "Q's" but that only applies when you are hand setting type for a printing press. This is a brief thought on how Erik Speikermann designed the META TYPEFace for the German Post Office in 1985. This came from an article in grafik magazine.

All I want poeple to get from this post is that not everything is either times roman or stencil when chosing how to communicate with "written" words. And that new technology such as the computer, and photoshop, and illustrator, all perform tasks that can be accomplished by human beings with only the click of their hand.