Entries tagged “fonts”

In a blog post that I wrote for work today, I had occasion to use an interrobang as part of a title. Hooray! A chance to exercise some pointless effort in pursuit of typographical correctness.

But chasing down that obscure character led me to thinking about an opportunity that still exists for all the type designers out there. Does any commercially-available font out there do a good job of anticipating modern uses of text like smileys and texting shortcuts, and create styled characters or ligatures for them?

We will increasingly see marks like :) and "B4" and "OMG" showing up in print or in styled text online, and that means we should have appropriate typography to represent these words and phrases as our language evolves. This, of course, would also require a Unicode character representation to be added for common smilies, just as one was added for the Euro symbol when that currency was introduced.

The Euro mark also offers us an opportunity to avoid a mistake made when that symbol was introduced. The familiar € mark was unfortunately introduced more as a logo than as a character, meaning designers were initially discouraged from tailoring the presentation of the symbol for appopriate display in the context of a particular font.

With smileys, and especially with new text ligatures from characters that would never have been paired up in the past, we have the chance to see font designers interpret these new parts of the language in the context of type designs that may have existed in some form for centuries. That promises to be fascinating!

Of course, I'm far from an expert about type, let alone about design in general, so maybe someone's already doing good work in this realm, and it's just escaped my notice. Either way, I look forward to finding out when I'll be able to use typographically elegant OMGs and ;)s on my blog.

The way the Métro started its life strongly influenced signage in the stations. In the early days, a number of commercial companies ran the different Métro lines. This is one of the reasons why the inscriptions varied enormously, from enamel signage to big ceramic station nameplates. Sans serifs were mostly used for big signage, and on the carriages, letters were painted in a style appropriate to the carriage design. Early on, it was Art Nouveau forms. At the time, most of the transportation procedure was done manually by rail workers, from the sale of individual tickets, to the semi-automatic door closing. Later, the national rail network, the RATP, took over.

From Métro Type, a history of type and signage in the Paris Metro system.

Pentagram, the designers of the website, signage, marketing materials, and stationery for the new New York Times building, have a fascinating blog post about the intricacies of the sign that they’ve created for the new Times Square skyscraper. The photo here is my cameraphone shot of the backside of the tower, taken when passing by yesterday.

And you thought this post was going to be about Prince.

Ten years ago, then-Microsoft fontographer Vincent Connare launched the Comic Sans Cafe.

During 1994 I noticed that a large number of cartoon/comic style software titles were under development at Microsoft. As Microsoft Creative Writer had a need for FUN fonts, I had an idea to make a lettering script similar to the lettering used by the major comic books.

There was a consistent style used in comics, which was quite unlike the style of lettering you see in newspaper cartoon strips. I also noticed that many people were inappropriately using drafting lettering in comic speech balloons.

Five years later, and half a decade ago, more from Vincent:

I can understand some of the sentiment behind the 'ban comic sans' campaign as often the font is used in an inappropriate way. Comic Sans was designed originally for use only by a comic application. That application and its inspiration was Microsoft Bob. MSBob used Times New Roman in cartoon balloons for the words of cartoon animals and characters...

Having said that, I feel that the use of my image, taken from a photo posted on my personal website, is inappropriate. The way people use the font and its distribution with Microsoft products has nothing to do with me.

The campaign he's referring to, of course, is ban comic sans.

Since I've already been described as a Microsoft apologist, despite creating delightful little films to mock their products, I might as well point out something I think was overlooked in the launch of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007: A great new font!

It's Segoe UI, which is bundled with the new versions of Microsoft's flagship OS and productivity suite. And like the Microsoft TrueType core fonts, Segoe could very well present an interesting new option for web developers.

Of course, the usual caveats apply. It'll be a while until the font is in common circulation, and it might never make it onto other platforms like the Mac and Linux. But that's why we have a set of fallback fonts; If you know that some large percentage of your audience might have access to the font, or you're in a controlled environment like an intranet, it's nice to have another good option.

Microsoft's System font information page for Vista has some additional good info on usage and guidelines.

(For what it's worth, I only blog about Microsoft regularly because it seems like there's very little discussion that isn't either shameless fanboyism or pointless bashing. I'll take another font option in my CSS from anybody that can offer it to me.)