I’m not alone. I’m not the only geek who likes fonts.
Yesterday, Jeff Atwood on his terrific Coding Horror blog, wrote about his love affair with typography:
You do have to be something of a font geek to appreciate the subtle differences between Helvetica and Arial, much less Helvetica and its precursor, Grotesk….. All computer geeks tend to fall in love with typography at some point in their careers…. Typography and fonts are a rare and vital intersection point between software engineers and designers.
Starting in college, I had had a fascination with fonts. I think that it started with a delve into computer-based graphic design which necessitated the search for the best digital typeface. I would scour the internet (FTP sites and newsgroups and some web sites) for the best free fonts. I filled up my font folio with so much crap that the performance of Windows 3.1 suffered. I commonly had to eliminate fonts to free up disk space. When others started collecting digital music, I was collecting fonts. I also took a few courses in typography which cemented my understanding of key concepts such as leading, kerning, justification, etc.
Guy was my companion into the strange world of type. Together we created the informal “No Banff” alliance. Banff is the TrueType knock off of Brush Script available on Windows PC’s. We found this typeface to be way overused in low quality advertising and signage. Guy and I went to the extent of creating anti-banff flyers and stickers, one of which I left inside of a London phone booth (I gotta find the photo of that).
Brush Script:
Banff:
Chank fonts were also one of our favorites during college. First, Chank is just a cool name for a font designer. Second, his typefaces are edgy and break many of the standard norms in font design.
from: Chank
For Christmas this year, I bought Guy a Hel-Fucking-Vetica T-Shirt. Next year, I’ll get myself one.
Alas, I have left much of my need to deal with fonts behind. I rarely install new fonts onto my PC and am not keeping abreast of the type industry in 2008. Maybe I’ll go pick up a typeface book for old times sake.
