I like fonts. You should too. If you don’t believe me, try watching [amazon asin=B000VWEFP8&text=Helvetica], a great documentary about the Neue Haas Grotesk font. You and I know it by its more familiar name of course.
The documentary is about the ubiquitous Helvetica font, and is lovely and informative, in spite of the hippies who refuse to use the font because it caused the Vietnam War (or something).
I also like the font Gill Sans, which was designed by typographer Eric Gill. You’ll recognise Gill Sans from the BBC logo, those tedious Keep Calm And Carry On posters, and from the London Underground.
It’s a nice font. Eric Gill on the other hand sounds like a heinous man. He was a deeply religious Roman Catholic, who slept with his sister, abused his children and molested his dog. He wrote a number of books, none of which I want to read. But I will keep using his font.
Comic Sans, on the other hand, can arse off.
If you use it for anything other than comic book typography, you should be deeply ashamed. It was designed by Vincent Connare as a font for comics, not for official company documents, office-wide memos, or important announcements about the existence of the Higgs Boson particle. It’s hard to read in large chunks.
This is worth watching:
Apparently the Georgia got its name from the tabloid headline “Alien heads found in Georgia”.
You’ve never heard of the Trajan font, but you’ve seen it many, many times:
And finally, for all you writers out there, Courier was designed in 1955 by Howard Kettler. IBM licenced it for their typewriters, and it soon became the font used on all typewriters. Screenplays still use this font as a result. It was originally called Messenger.
So, now you know about fonts. Get back to work.
