So, on a whim I've been reading about fonts. Yeah, fonts--as in typefaces. I've never really thought about them before, except perhaps noticing that an old book looks "old-fashioned" or that some flyer or webpage is maybe a little hard on the eyes. But it's really fascinating, and far more complicated than I'd expected. There are new typefaces
coming out all the time, some of them modifications on a few "classic" styles that have been around since the 17th century, and sometimes radically new styles. Newspapers and magazines often commission fonts for their own private use, to create a distinctive "look" for their publication. (The Wall Street Journal just did a major typeface redesign. The differences are subtle, but the new fonts were designed from scratch to be more modern but similar to the old ones. And the new font for the stock-market pages (called Retina) is actually really cool. It's designed to be clear at very small typefaces, and the bold-weight letters are no wider than the normal-weight ones. The way the designer kind of truncated the curvy bits on the letters also makes it compress really well. There are names for all these things, but I don't know what they are.) And all the fonts that have been made since people started keeping records are on file, and follow the same copyright rules that any other work does.

So, wow. Neat. And I've been trying to see things like a typographer (?) would, which is also really interesting, because you don't normally really look at a font. You just read the words--the type is almost a throwaway medium.

One thing that surprised me: I've always been kind of creeped out by Newsweek magazine. It's always seemed kind of 'icky' to me, somehow. Turns out they're using a font called Vincent, designed by Matthew Carter, that I really don't like. It mixes little froofy ornaments on some letters with rather severe curved serifs on others. Sometimes you'll have a few words where the sharp serifs grate on each other, and sometimes the froofy things blob together, depending on the sequence of letters. I just think it's ugly--especially on that glossy magazine paper--and it makes reading the magazine an unpleasant experience. Who knew? I never would have picked up on the fact that it was the font I didn't like, since I never would have thought about the font at all, until I started learning about this stuff.

So, yay fontographers! (Or whatever they're called...) The world would be a less interesting place for reading without them.