(,la) A Typographical Analysis
After looking over the various versions of the meme online (baseball caps seem to be the most popular items for sale) I found that they either use traditional serif fonts such as Baskerville or slab serifs such as Chaparral, or they simply resort to some script font.
Three “Poorly Typeset” Billboards
This is something I see this all the time, ads, posters, and yes billboards that are not properly typeset. This is mostly the result of lazy and/or ignorant “designers” who type text into a computer and think that Photoshop or Illustator will magically set the type for them.
Frutiger, A Humanist Grotesque Typeface
Adrian Frutiger’s namesake typeface Frutiger has been, for reasons beyond me, categorized as a Humanist typeface by the type industry. The Frutiger (typeface) entry in Wikipedia states that “Frutiger is a humanist sans-serif typeface”. But I contend that it is a grotesque and Adrian Frutiger himself concurs, “I felt I was on the right track with this grotesque it was a truly novel typeface.” It was a “novel typeface” so novel that it created a whole new type classification which I call Humanist Grotesque.
The Impact of Impact
I ran across this article on Vox the other day about the font [sic] “Impact.” The writer seems unaware that Impact (1965) was commissioned by Monotype to compete with Linotype’s Helvetica Inserat (1957) (Inserat is German for a form of advertising, like a newspaper insert). Although, Geoffrey Lee, the designer of Impact, said he was more influenced by Schmalfette Grotesk then by Insert (Schmalfette Grotesk was later digitized and renamed for its designer, Walter Haettenschweiler). They belong to a group of typefaces designed in the mid 50s, early 60s, called Realist Sans, which included one of my favorite typefaces, Compacta (1963).
The Fallacy of a Helvetica Substitute Font-Stack
I constantly see these posts about Helvetica substitute font stacks that list Humanist faces. Helvetica is a Neo-Grotesque and except for Univers and Folio, and the Arial/Arimo fonts, and Roboto, kinda.
So, What Is It with Comic Sans Anyway?
The problem with Comic Sans is not just that it is more often then not inappropriately used, it is its poor, disjointed design.
CSS Typography and Vertical Rhythm
Relative to font-size i.e. proportional line-height
The Scoorge of Dreamweaver
I see this CSS font stack declaration all the time font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;. But what exactly is the point? In fact there is absolutely no point in declaring Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif as all Apple products have Arial installed. So no one — except maybe some UNIX user who happens to not have Arial installed but does happen to have Helvetica installed, or maybe some Mac user who has deinstalled Arial — will ever see Helvetica. The correct declaration should be Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif. So, why is this?