Fonts of Inspiration

Spread from The Anatomy of Type

When did we all become amateur typography experts? Perhaps we should credit Steve Jobs, a calligraphy buff who built a bunch of cool typeface options into early Macs. By the time I got to college, any sophomore worth her salt had firm feelings about whether Palatino or Garamond looked better on her Classic II. And any professor worth her salt knew that a term paper printed in 12-point Courier was a desperate attempt to stretch eight thin pages to the required 10.

By 2007, some of us were actually watching a feature-length documentary about a font. We grew adept at spotting Helvetica, the ubiquitous "typeface of capitalism," on storefronts and billboards. We even took online quizzes that tested our capacity to distinguish its flat-topped t from Arial's slope-roofed impostor.

In 2008, a typeface won a presidential election. At least, that's the impression you may have gotten if you read one of the countless stories extolling the virtues of Gotham. Originally commissioned for a GQ redesign, Gotham came to define the Obama campaign's clean visual signature. The website of Hoefler & Frere-Jones, the foundry that invented Gotham, went momentarily viral after a catty blog post ridiculed the fonts used by rival campaigns. Though, to be fair, I find it hard to deny that the McCain logo seemed better suited to a downscale drugstore cologne.

Nowadays we raise a ruckus when Ikea abruptly switches its corporate identity from Futura to Verdana. We sign petitions proposing an outright ban on Comic Sans. We chuckle at cruel, font-based humor: "Comic Sans walks into a bar and the bartender says, 'We don't serve your type here.' " We leap to correct those who naively say "font" when the correct term is "typeface." (No doubt I've already done it in this essay, and will do so again. Many apologies.)

If you merely wish to be annoying at cocktail parties, Simon Garfield's 2011 book Just My Type covers the Ikea incident, the Comic Sans saga, and lots of other fun waypoints in the history of typography. If, however, your aim?like mine?is to blow past jovial dorkery, level up, and ascend to a realm reserved for the truly insufferable pedant ... may I recommend a new coffee table hardback from Stephen Coles? The Anatomy of Type offers granularity that would glaze the eyes of a normal, well-adjusted human. I couldn?t get enough of it.

Coles begins with a glossary, and with annotation. He identifies the discrete elements that form a character (or "glyph"): the aperture, terminal, ascender, ear, and so forth. He then classifies typeface groups using a mix of appearance and ancestry?be they rooted in brush strokes, chisel engravings, fountain-pen scribbles, or something more machined and modern. He informs us that when sans-serif typefaces (with no little feet at the tops and bottoms of their letters) first appeared in the mid-1800s, they were labeled "grotesque" because they looked quite bizarre to unaccustomed eyes.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=ed054ac46dc05a0aa7f825de8aea7101

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