Craft Candy

Typography, as I’m sure you know, is the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Broadly speaking, font design. The aim of this post, rather than to provide a brief history of type and typeography, is to show you some interesting fonts, share with you some font download sites, and show you some font and typography related curios. I hope you like them. Because type and typography is a really technical topic.

So, beginning with the free font download site shares. I regularly use:

1. 1001 free fonts. From the Ronseal school of web addresses.

2. daFont. My favourite.

3. Abstract Fonts. Boast some 12,860 free fonts, including a long list of interesting and useful(?) dingbats.

4. And some free handwriting font downloads from Tripwire Magazine

Or fancy making your own font? Try Fontifier. $9 for your handwriting fontified! See my efforts, and my penchant for the reverse italics oddity font below. And check my pangram!

A pangram (Greek: pan gramma, “every letter”), or holoalphabetic sentence, is a sentence using every letter of the alphabet at least once. They are commonly used in the displaying of typefaces. There are many, though ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ is the only one that ever seems to get a look in. Here is a list of alternatives. Do try to use them, some of them are much better than The quick brown fox…

‘The five boxing wizards jumped quickly!’

‘Jack, love my big wad of sphinx quartz!’

‘Glib jocks quiz nymph to vex dwarf.’

Here’s another, showcasing a few of my favourite fonts (today’s favourites at least, tomorrow’s may differ):

And for the technically minded, or the totally baffled, a comprehensive Font & Typography terminology glossary from ParaType.

Check this couple of fascinating font/typography design projects. Dead-celebrities-made-out-of-fonts!

The Periodic Table of Typefaces groups fonts by families and classes of typefaces:  sans-serif, serif, script, blackletter, glyphic, display, grotesque, realist, didone, garalde, geometric, humanist, slab-serif and mixed.

Some more links for designers and font enthusiasts:

1. Typies blog brings us a designers guide to good font selection.

2. Best fonts for designers, from Just Creative Design.

3. Another curio. A Star Wars animated typography video. Guttenbergtastic!

4. And just for fun, a website-based call-to-arms* to stop the widespread use of the font Comic Sans. Creators of Ban Comic Sans state that although there are a ‘few specific instances’ in which Comic Sans is appropriate, they fear ‘widespread abuses of printed type threaten to erode the very foundations upon which centuries of typographic history are built.’ And I agree.

*the pen is mightier than the sword

Until next Wednesday – Inspire or Expire.