Here you will find lots of information about type and things related to fonts: Learn things you never knew before!

					Click on the above link to find out just exactly how digital fonts are created!

				As a type designer what are my favorite fonts? Below is an image of some typefaces. Whether for their classical beauty, or their fun and interesting appearance, these are the ones I admire...

Did you know?...

In the olden days when printing was done with metal type, printers referred to punctuation, symbols and bullets collectively as "sorts". Today we use this in a common expression, because a printing run would be delayed and disrupted when the printer was "Out of Sorts"!

When printing was done with metal type, each letter had to be set by hand into the chassis. They were kept in two wooden cases that sat at an angle next to the worktable. The harder to reach "upper case" held the Capital letters, and the easier to reach "lower case" held the more commonly used small letters, hence the term we use for these letters today.

A "Font" and a "typeface" are not the same thing. Although in today's world the terms tend to be used interchangeably, what most people really mean when they say "font" is typeface. A typeface refers to the design itself, or more aptly, all sizes of a particular design. For example, ITC Garamond Bold is a typeface. A font really is a typeface in a specific point size. Example: ITC Garamond Bold 10 pt. This comes from the old days of metal type when each size of a typeface had to be cast and set separately. Meaning ITC Garamond Bold 10 pt and ITC Garamond Bold 12 pt are the same typeface, but different fonts. With our modern digital typography, all a designer really creates is the typeface. The computer can scale it to any size needed. So for all you nitpicky people out there like me....That "Font" menu on your computer should really say "typeface", and the "size" menu should say "font"!

Ampersand The ampersand is the name used for the "&" symbol. Its form is a derivative of the letters E and T from the latin word "et" which means "and". It can be one of the most graceful and versatile forms in a typeface design.

PostScript Sometimes called "Type 1" These fonts use a Bézier curve description to print and display the characters in a typeface. They are generally considered the professional standard.

True Type These fonts use a Quadratic G-Spline curve description and are the brainchild of Apple and Microsoft. Although their quality has improved greatly since they first came out, it is always advisable to use PostScript for professional work.

Kerning Kerning refers to the spacing between individual letter pairs. A common example would be the capital "T" and lowercase "o". Many fonts have kerning pairs built in, to automatically adjust spacing problems but in order to make use of them you must have software that supports kerning. Most high end graphic software such as Adobe Illustrator® or QuarkXPress will support kerning.

Serif The small ending cross strokes on letterforms. Serifs make body text easier to read in small point sizes. Typefaces without serifs, such as Helvetica are called Sans-Serif

Many of the common typefaces we use today are named for the people who originally designed them. In the image above you probably see three font names you are familiar with. But they aren't just names. They were living, breathing, human beings who helped shape the history of our world by their innovative designs.

Claude Garamond was one of the original type designers at the beginning of the sixteenth century. His designs have been used for over 500 years. His typefaces fit into a classification generally known as Old Style or Garalde...a combination of Garamond's name and Aldus Manutius' name, who was a contemporary of Garamond. Incidently it is Manutius who is credited with designing the first Italic typeface.

William Caslon was an eighteenth century type designer who brought a new design sensibility to England. He developed the work of his predecessors into a style that today we call "Transitional" or sometimes "Dutch" Caslon's type designs became so successful, they spread from England to the American Colonies, where they were used to print the Declaration of Independence.

Giambattista Bodoni worked as the printer for the Duke of Parma in Italy for 45 years. His faces fall into a category known as "Modern". By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, type founding had become perfected enough to allow machine-like precision in the design of typefaces. Hence the attributes that define Modern faces: Extreme contrast between thin and thick strokes, vertical stress, and hairline thin serifs.