Posts Tagged ‘Fonts’

Check out the beautiful covers designs Penguin has created for eight literary classics:

Turn of the Screw, Henry James
The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Thérèse Raquin, Émile Zola
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky

Penguin teamed up with AIDS awareness (RED) and a team of designers. Each designer used a quote from the book in the cover design. If you like words and typography, you’ll like them. My favourites are Anna Karenina and The Secret Agent. Notes from the Underground is also pretty intense. Yours?

Hat tip to Sarah Turner

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Take this fun test on Pentagram’s website at www.pentagram.com/what-type-are-you. Pentagram is a British design firm.

Can’t say the test is accurate—first time I took it my answers linked me to Architype Van Doesburg.

I think it’s awful. According to the site, this font expresses “strength of form and firmness of purpose.” It’s a “brutally fair” typeface, in which every letter occupies equal space. Apparently I would “wrestle anyone who claims C is less important than D.” Hmm, I am a bit strong, I admit that, but brutal? Would I wrestle someone over a typeface? Certainly not this one.

Try it yourself and let me know what type you are: www.pentagram.com/what-type-are-you

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If you like jokes about fonts—and who wouldn’t?—check out these two videos from College Humor. We learned about them from Stefan Budansew, a participant from an Elections Ontario course who shares our passion for language.

Remember the site is for college students, so some of the previews you might see are, um, inappropriate. Unless you happen to live with college-age students, in which case you’re probably immune.

1. Font Conference is a meeting of personified type faces (French Script wears a beret and has a heavy accent, Comic Sans wears a cape and gets to save the day—you get the picture).
2. Font Fight depicts a battle between two gangs, one led by Helvetica, and one by her clone, Arial. A little violent, and again, Comic Sans gets the last line.

Still, we’re not recommending you actually use Comic Sans.

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Comic Sans is a type face you either love or hate.

It was created in 1994 by Microsoft in-house font designer Vincent Connare, who was appalled to see Times New Roman being used in cartoon speech bubbles. Turning to comic books for inspiration, he created Comic Sans. Although it was specifically designed for instructional software and programs aimed at children, it somehow got bundled into Windows 95 as one of the system fonts. From there, its popularity took off. And its popularity continues to grow so quickly, that it threatens to overtake Helvetica and Times New Roman by 2013.

This enrages Holly and Dave Combs, who started Ban Comic Sans, an international movement with this mission:

While we recognize the font may be appropriate in a few specific instances, our position is that the only effective means of ending this epidemic of abuse is to completely ban Comic Sans.

If you start to look, you’ll see Comic Sans everywhere. Love it or hate it, the main thing is to know enough about typography to understand why you should probably avoid it.

Type is a voice, and the type you choose is the tone of that voice. Ideally, it supports your message by being transparent, invisible. It’s the same with the best writing—the style serves the purpose and never draws attention to itself, never distracts the reader from the message.

Imagine a Danger: Do Not Enter sign. It’s probably in Arial Black, which would add authority. Appropriate, right? Imagine a legal document in Times New Roman—just the right amount of serious. Imagine a wedding invitation in a script—it’s elegant, formal, romantic. Now imagine any of these documents in Comic Sans. Ridiculous, right? And see what the American dollar bill looks like in Comic Sans. It’s just wrong.

Okay, comic sans does have appropriate uses, such as in comic book design, or in a sixth grader’s essay. It’s been used on Beanie Babies since the late 1990s. And that seems right. But does it belong on building signs? Or on information sheets for people with cancer? On legal documents?

Does it belong in business writing? No way. Its tone is childish, silly and friendly to the point of annoying. Definitely not professional. It says “Don’t take me seriously.”

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