After all the reminiscing that @emmajanedotnet and I were doing about typography the other day, I decided to hunt down an old novelty font I'd put together based on simple ballpoint pen block lettering. There's nothing particularly special about the font (I called it Verby Blocks) but some poking and prodding in FontForge ironed out some of the kinks. Why not post it for downloading?

I'm releasing it under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license; feel free to knock yourself out with it, embed it in web pages, fix problems, paint your dog funny colors, etc.

This week The Wall Street Journal profiled Comic Sans, the font designers love to hate. It's an interesting article that gives designer Vincent Connare a chance to point out why he created it in the firs place. Microsoft was making a fun, bouncy product for children and the on-screen dialogue of a helpful assistant was being rendered in Times New Roman. Context faaaaail.

Designer @markboulton today poked his head out of the #d7ux Drupal redesign trenches to comment on the typeface. I've tried to pull together a chain of tweets into a unified quote:

Am I the only designer to think that Comic Sans is NOT an ugly/bad typeface? Its usage should be specific, but it's been abused, that's all. The reason it has been used so much is that it does a very, very good job at communicating values: fun, friendly, childlike, innocent....

Good typographic design is about context, right? Comic Sans on important signage is bad, but on a kids invitation? Comic Sans (incorrect) usage is a result of not giving users the right tools to make good design decisions. Simply having a font dropdown in Word means anyone can use it to do bad things with. So, why not give them better tools?

It's the victim of ordinary people making uniformed design decisions.

Well put, I think. There are better fonts than Comic Sans for comic lettering, but that's not what most designers are complaining about when they slag on it. They see people putting a lemonade stand font on corporate emails, and they shudder. It's important to remember that Garamond looks pretty silly on a lemonade stand, too.

Meanwhile, Mark Pilgrim rants about type foundries and their impact on the state of embedded web fonts. He titles his post "Fuck The Foundries." That captures the spirit of it pretty nicely.

Let me put it another way. [Commercial] Fonts are superior to [Open] Fonts in every conceivable way, except one:
WE CAN'T FUCKING USE THEM.

He argues that typography will suffer from the same gnawing-at-the-margins effect that proprietary CMS vendors suffer in a world of Open Source Software. Their stuff may start better, but an army of people tweaking, polishing, and giving away can very quickly close the gap until the difference is indistinguishable.

While we wait for browsers to catch up with font embedding, there are a couple of groups that could evolve into ad-hoc 'Open Foundries' for embeddable fonts. Yum. @emmajanedotnet and I are already trading font stories -- If I'm not careful I could get sucked into type fetishism again.

Also? Business cards made of meat. Yes.

Grungy, hand-lettered type has been with us for a long time. About a decade ago, I did all the headlines and callouts for my blog with a Bic pen -- I thought the look was super cool. That look gets pretty old, though; not many sites should look like a fifteen year old's angsty poetry journal.

More recently, the awesome opening sequence for the movie Juno put the spotlight on a growing trend towards scratchy, hand-lettered fonts that look like actual typefaces, rather than chicken-scratches. This look will probably be cliche soon enough, too, but in the meantime I've been hunting around for fun hand-lettered fonts that actually look like type. Naturally, they're all free...  Continue reading...

I got my start as a "computer professional" in the world of desktop publishing, not computer programming. When I was younger, I wrote and I made a zine and (naturally) as I learned a bit more about the rules of design, I tried to pick up work doing heavy labor in Pagemaker, Quark, and Illustrator.

I spent several years working for a small marketing company, doing basic design and layout work, writing copy for clients who had a business but didn't know how to describe it, and -- eventually -- tinkering with HTML when the company tried to take the plunge into New Media in the mid 90s. A decade of crazy twists and turns later, I'm a straight-up software developer who's years removed from any real design work. I never stopped loving good type, though.

I'll never claim to be a typographer... Maybe a type aficionado? In any case, I think every once in a while I'll be posting one of my favorite faces here, just because. Tonight, it's Bodoni. It's always seemed very dignified to me: classy and direct without being stuffy. What do you think?