Few typefaces are so well-known and instantly recognisable as Comic Sans. Even people with no interest at all in typography will pick it out from a random selection of typefaces, having no clue what the others might be called. And […]
Tag: typeface
Don’t judge a book by its cover – just take a close look at its face.
Hard to believe now, but there was a time when books were all written by hand, came in large and bulky volumes available only to the very few – and very rich. Imagine monks seated in their ‘scriptorium’, hunched over […]
Typeface of the week – Baskerville
For many people, the first reaction to Baskerville will be Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles, probably the great detective’s most famous adventure. That was first published in 1902 and the Baskerville typeface dates from the mid-1700s and […]
Typeface of the week – Univers
Univers lives up to its name – it’s universal, probably the most used typeface in the world. The popularity is largely because it’s so bland, characterless, and inoffensive that it can safely be used for anything from baby food to […]
Typeface of the week – Rockwell
Perhaps because it’s reminiscent of typewriter output, Rockwell creates a sense of urgency as a text-face – that you’re reading direct from the author’s page without the intermediate delay of a compositor having to assemble the words or key them […]
Typeface of the week – Cheltenham
An old typesetters’ saying was “You can’t beat Chelt”. Usually as reaction to having to work with a ‘new-fangled’ face like Excelsior or Century. They had a point. Cheltenham, aka Gloucester (check your atlas!) had its merits but for some […]
That Bourgeois is just my type, of course…
What has been seen by millions but few would be able to identify correctly in a police station lineup? In different context, this would probably be a good pub-quiz stumper, but our column’s title must be a dead giveaway. The […]
Typeface of the week – Bembo
Since as long ago as 1496, readers have enjoyed books typeset in Bembo. The very name comes from the first book to use the face – a small volume of poems by the Italian cleric Pietro Bembo. The face […]
A simple collection – on the face of it
I collect typefaces. There, I said it. I hoard them, the way magpies and jackdaws used to collect milk-bottle tops and still do with discarded foil wraps. It sounds terribly banal – deeply boring and very, very sad. In fact, […]
Typeface of the week – Gill Sans
Gill Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface. It was designed by Eric Gill and released in 1928 by the British branch of Monotype. The face itself had humble origins. In 1926, Gill was commissioned to paint a fascia for a […]