Fonts are everywhere
Take a look at the smooth circular lines of each metro station, look at the fluro scribbled notice on the window highlighting the daily menu specials, or consider the mess of sprayed tags on the walls outside or even our fetching pink logo and you will see that in the world of fonts, things can vary greatly.
Wikipedia says: “Typography is the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing), adjusting the spaces between groups of letters (tracking) and adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning).”
Until the digital age typography was a specialized occupation, even royalty had special font designers to work on their brand. Digitization opened up this art to new generations of visual designers and lay users. By breaking fonts down to a few basic elements designers have been able to take simple fonts and customize them to suit their needs. Some web sites offer users customizable fonts, made by taking a photo, via webcam, of a printed out sheet, filled out in the users own handwriting: http://www.fontifier.com/. While other websites can determine through a selection process, which font best describes your personality: http://www.pentagram.com/what-type-are-you/.
Some different font attributes
- Bold – Thicker lines usually used in headlines or emphasizing a particular word
- Italic – slanted version of the font used to denote sarcasm, creative titles and prefixes.
- Sherifs – The little tails on letters.
- CAPSLOCK – I AM YELLING BECAUSE I AM ANGRY OR DON’T KNOW HOW TO WORK A KEYBOARD!!!
A brief look at some popular fonts?
Impact – A very popular font around speaking cats on the internet. It is known to decrease grammatical accuracy.
Bradley Hand ITC – A good font for showing your lightheartedness around the office. Just popped out for lunch? Let your employees know by leaving them a message in this casual font.
Helvetica – The superior designer’s font. Looks like Arial but it isn’t, ok. It’s stylish and, um, um, it’s not Arial!
Courier New – Use this font if you want people to think you are serious when you hand them your new script, or if you want them to think you own a typewriter.
Wingdings – An ancient text with inexplicable origins, first discovered by Microsoft Windows 3.1, it has continued to puzzle linguists to this day.
Times New Roman – The font of serious, sensible discourse, made by someone who has yet to discover the “change font” function.
Jokerman – You see, church newsletters can be fun!
Comic Sans – THERE IS NEVER A REASON TO USE THIS FONT!!!
It’s better to look at the fonts to our magazine. You can find it at the nearest bar or club.