I Just Wiped My Font Book
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fonts
You know you have to do something when opening your font drop-down menu looks like being buried with outmoded dresses from an overloaded wardrobe. And no matter what you choose to wear, you’re never satisfied with it and it always seems wrong for the occasion and it ends up piled on your chair, on your desk and everywhere in your room, gathering dust and looking oddly inappropriate like a heap of broken lava lamps.
There was a time, as a very young and reckless designer, when I used to download a new font for every new project. And there was another time when I was sick with it and as a recoil I sticked with Helvetica no matter what.
In the end, in my never-ending attempt at being a better designer than what I am, a couple of weeks ago I decided that I had to make up for my ignorance in typography and do something with that font book. I finally wanted some order, some elegance.
Following some advice I had been given in the past, I picked up Just My Type by Simon Garfield. It was a sudden revelation. Garfield succeeded in what every other teacher and book had failed: making me passionate about type.
And the reason he succeeded is quite simple: he got me interested by telling me, like many little tales, about the people behind the fonts. That’s what gives personality to a font, it helps me understand it, remember it, and and it ultimately gives me reasons why to choose it or not.
So I enthusiastically set up and read the book, and after I finished I thought I had to do something more with it. First of all, I elected most of the font Garfield writes about as my preferred fonts, making sure to acquire those few I didn’t have already. Then, I deleted from my system font book all the other useless and crappy fonts I had amassed over the years.
But that was not enough: I wanted to have a sort of compendium, a short abstract of every font and, most importantly, of the person behind it. I wanted to fix in my mind those typefaces, in a very real sense.
Fortunately, the Internet came to my aid, and I was easily able to find a portrait of (almost) every single font designer described in the book.
The outcome — you can see it by yourself. I filled four pages with portraits and abstract, more or less copying and pasting the words of Simon Garfield (I couldn’t find better ones) so credit him for everything.
Then I sliced every piece in small rectangles. I still didn’t decide if I want to stick them together like those Pantone color booklets or hang them up on the walls of my room. Probably the latter. You saw some already. Here is all the rest. Enjoy!
That’s all! It was an extremely fun and interesting little project for me. I hope it can be useful for you too, wether you want to make some order in your font collection or you just need to pick a good typeface for your next project. What other fonts should I add?
