All things fonts

Hello again world.

Apparently my post about Flocke the polar bear was pretty riveting because you’re back! Thank you! But this time I shall move on and continue explaining what will be a fairly random blog about things I love.

As you will recall, one of my other great loves is graphic design but mainly typography.  I LOVE typography.  I have a trillion fonts on my computer as we speak – so many that I can never find any at all!  Figures.  I don’t know why I love fonts so much but ever since I can remember, I’ve been able to name most fonts I see around town.  It probably started in 4th grade computer lab.  That’s when I fell in love with Apple Computer or MAC.  I loved their use of fonts back then and their clean interface.  So here I am, mid-twenties on my mac desktop and blogging about font love.

What I’ve Learned About Typography

In graphic design, your choice of typeface and how you make it work in your piece along with other typeface, color schemes, and so on will make the difference between a great design and a terrible, terrible design.  There are many fonts that died a long time ago and some people have not been notified.  When I see Comic Sans, Curlz or Papyrus, among others, I cry a little.  Please no.

worst-fonts-ever

I have a vast library.  BUT, just because we have thousands and thousands of fonts to choose from these days doesn’t mean we have to use them all.  Less is better.  Simple is beautiful. I love Helvetica Light.  It’s an oldie, but tried and true.  It continues to please the eye.  It’s clean and fresh.

FREE fonts are everywhere and some are great but a truly great font is worth investing into.  Professionally designed fonts take an incredible amount of work.  If you’ve ever seen a font designer in action, you’d be riveted.  Professionally designed fonts give you many benefits – various weights and styles to form families, kerning pairs, international characters and languages, glyphs to add variety to type-setting, and so much more.  I love glyphs in particular and will pay a pretty penny for a font with an amazing array of glyphs.

If you dabble in design like me and love fonts, here is a great guide to using fonts together.

There you have it – my two cents about fonts.

Ty

design-quotes-7-prints