Typefaces are a major part of our visual experience and anyone with a computer probably has access to dozens of fonts. We all like to use them to express ourselves in email, letters or, if you're like me, creating that special menu or party invitation using Photoshop.
So whether you find it interesting or not, type is everywhere and has a strong emotional effect on how we perceive and react to so many forms of visual communication.
The author of Just My Type, Simon Garfield, has produced a really interesting account of the history and development of type. Simon's excellent knowledge of the subject and entertaining and witty style make this a really good read.
This book explains how fonts have become such a big part of our lives and also offers some advice on how and when to use them. The book itself uses over a 100 fonts with chapters describing a particular font and its designer. (It's worth reading for the chapter on Comic Sans alone.)
The story is right up-to-date and includes the fonts you see on your mobile phone but starts with the earliest type designs produced in the 1440s. The book is also a potted history of printing technology and on a personal note it covers my career in printing exactly.
When I started in print in 1962, everything was hot metal and letterpress - William Caxton could have walked into any 1960s printing house and started setting type. By the time the Beatles disbanded in 1970 everything had changed. Offset Litho was king and hot metal had given way to computer-set type on film. ( or "cold type" as we called it in those days).
This book covers nearly all the typesetting technology I worked with, hot metal (Monotype and Linotype), the Lumitype film setter, the IBM Selectric Typewriter with the interchangeable type sphere ("golf ball"), which could be used to produce camera-ready copy to make a printing plate. I used a Selectric a lot in the early days of computer typesetting, then we called them "idiot boards" as you didn't have to make any decisions about word breaks, just type in the text.
The Selectric typewriter was connected to a punch producing paper tape which was fed into a computer. The computer converted the octal encoded punched tape into punched tape that could be read by the control unit of the Lumitype film setter. All the printing technology was in the computer and one of the first jobs I did when I started using computers was to type in a hyphenation dictionary.
There is even a chapter on Letraset, the rub down lettering that made everyone a typographer - I still have a stack of this stuff in the attic. The description of how Letraset was made is really interesting. The process took a long time to create a complete font as every character was cut by hand before photographing and the type cutters worked in a windowless factory to avoid dust.
All major type designers are mentioned in the book, Eric Gill and Edward Johnston (who created the font for the London Underground) are two of my particular favourites. Although Gill would probably be on the sex offenders register if he were still alive.
There are some interesting asides, such as the designer who writes a blog about inappropriate typefaces used in films. This is just too pedantic, please get a life. Then there was the outrage when IKEA changed its font from Futura to Verdana, apparently the O in Futura reminded everyone of the classic Swedish meatball. The New York Times commented that this was probably the biggest controversy ever to come out of Sweden. You can't mess with IKEA - they're part of the furniture.
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| 2012 Headline, about to take over the world. Seen here on the London Underground. |
The book also tries to define the world's worst typeface, and guess which one it is - 2012 Headline, the font chosen for the 2012 Olympics. It's nice to know that Team GB have already won an Olympic medal, coming first in the crap typeface competition.
Just My Type by Simon Garfield, published by Profile Books, 2010.
Colon-Dash rating: :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
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