RORY DOT BE

There’s a very good reason why you didn’t get that last job, why they’re still not replying to your emails, and why you failed that last paper—yet again. There’s a reason why no one comes to your parties. It has almost nothing to do with your Hallensteins suit, Hotmail’s not down for anyone else, and no one fails History of Design that many times. Your parties are actually quite good.

Amongst your peers, however, there’s no secret to your failure. Your type choices are, quite frankly, embarrassing. Your cramped, centred text is unsightly, and you seem to want to get far closer to the edge of your paper than your printer is entirely comfortable with.

It is a strange and wonderful thing, that despite the vast number of ways in which something may be said, the overwhelming majority of those ways are at best flawed, and at worst objectively and assuredly wrong. These ways are likely to cause tears of disappointment in all who care about such things, and so too it is with typography and its typographers. Despite having at your disposal a plethora of tools with which to impart your world-changing, environment-cleansing, kitten-cuddling messages, almost all of these should be inextricably banished from your “C:\Windows\Fonts” folder. The rest should be used with the utmost of respect, adoration, or at least a waning interest, for they shall forever contain the ability to transform your well‑crafted prose into a humorous office memo. One that can only hope to alleviate some of its attributable damage by being, at least, recycled.

Some History

Since Johannes Gutenberg first put bits of inky metal to paper in the mid-1400s, typographers have required typefaces after which to name their otherwise quickly floundering profession. Gutenberg’s earliest faces were calligraphic Blackletters—including Textura, and the slightly more modest but certainly no easier to read Fraktur. These proudly live on today on the covers of albums going for that ‘Gothy Metal’ look, a kind of ‘Scary Hip‑Hop’ look, or spelling out someone’s name at the top of the windscreen of that car that’s still doing laps at 1am on a Tuesday. As your mouse hovers threateningly over OldeEnglish.ttf , remember that they have no place on your hard drive.

Encouraged by Gutenberg’s new invention that the Chinese had already invented, new typefaces began to spring up all over Europe—predominantly in the ‘Roman’ style. Italian calligraphers, in their determination to create new faces in the supposedly superior style of the Romans, had mistaken Carolingian minuscules for the One True Script of the Ancients. They hurriedly combined it with some capital letters they’d found on an old pole belonging to some guy called Trajan, only to be horribly embarrassed when they realised what they’d done.

Nonetheless, these formed the basis for all later ‘Roman’ typefaces, and after making all the letters look a bit more like each other, and borrowing some italics from somewhere else so it didn’t read like they were shouting every time they tried to emphasise a word, the typographers of the day had set in stone, so to speak, the various forms of all western lettering to come for the next few hundred or so years.

These new faces were highly legible, and shied away from recreating what could otherwise be done by hand. Blackletters, unreadable to all but Germans and vampiric ducks, were replaced by Roman faces such as Jenson’s Jenson, Garamound’s Garamound, Caslon’s Caslon, Basker­ville’s Baskerville, as well as faces by less conceited typographers such as Griffo’s Bembo, and Voskens’ Fell types—imported to Britain during some unfortunate bureaucracy that halted the production of any British type for a bit.

The Bit Before Now

This was all very well, until the mid-1800s birthed a group of scalpel-wielding pre-Modernists, who took great joy in lopping off the lovely serifs that had been gradually refined over the previous four hundred years. Having thrown off the shackles of their oppressors, these new sans-serif typefaces recruited an appropriate lowercase shortly thereafter, and now make up the other half of the majority of contemporary typefaces.

In a move that isn’t representative at all of general technological and creative advancements in the 20th century, the last hundred years have shown more subtle advances in the way we understand type. We’ve long since given up looking for any absolute answers, and have instead embraced all variants upon a theme in that post‑ironic way we do so well. Soft, bouncy humanist sans‑serifs now live happily alongside more seriously international neo‑grotesques; contemporary serifs remain very nearly structurally identical to their 15th century great‑great‑grandparents; geometric type comes and goes depending on how cool computers are at the time; and some people still aren’t bored with Helvetica.

It’s hard to say who’s the most naïve—the hip café‑dwelling Italian masters of the 1400s who thought that old retro‑chic 1st‑century AD look was back for good, or those annoying graphic‑designer friends you have who still think that Helvetica is God’s (read: Max Miedinger’s) gift to the world, and have the Swiss flag tattooed on their egos. Typography, like anything, is liable to show its age. Contemporary typographers are often happy to explore anything resembling type—from the minimalism of pure geometry to the maximalism of arranging your name in hair.

The Bit Where Things Are Bridged Together

As you write, you are partaking in an exercise oft referred to as ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. It should, therefore, come as no great surprise, that it is very much in your best interest to borrow said giants’ typewriters, keyboards, type sets, printers, and any other possessions they happen to have collected on their way. If possible, sit yourself comfortably around their eye level, so they might notice and chastise you as you attempt to set your latest prose in Verdana.

There is a reason you have so many delightfully banal fonts on your computer. Most early designers were too preoccupied with witch-burning to have the forethought to think about how their delicate strokes were going to look when converted to vectors, then pixels, and finally displayed on that old CRT you’ve still got.

It is only fairly recently that computers have found these new jobs for typefaces, or fonts, to do. Whereas previously typefaces were designed with ink‑traps, so words didn’t get too smudgy when over‑inked, fonts are now hinted, so words don’t get too smudgy when they’re converted to pixels. Default fonts supplied with operating systems are loaded with nice big character sets, and as sick as we are of seeing them, they really do do a commendable job of rendering pretty much anything that gets thrown at them.

As the internet matures, blossoming from a 20-something alt.binaries.warez.linux Usenet moderator, to your 40-something mum who has all the time in the world to blog about her cats’ favourite recipes, so too does its typographic component. There are currently a great many very long and very touchy conversations about how to display type nicely on the net without letting people pilfer them too easily. Add to this the challenge of getting Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and the rest to play to the same rules, and you end up with some fairly primitive typographical technology.

The interim solution to all this is a collection of fonts designated ‘web-safe’. This means everyone has them, and you can slather your band’s MySpace page with them without any unsightly rectangles or question marks popping up. They do, however, tend to have the unfortunate side-effect of looking incredibly bland on paper.

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