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, the Most Influential Typeface of the 20th Century

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.

There is an argument for Frutiger being the most important typeface of the 20th century

Frutiger, A Humanist Grotesque Typeface

Adrian Frutiger’s namesake typeface Frutiger has been categorized as a Humanist typeface by the type industry but it is a grotesque, a Humanist Grotesque.

The Impact of Impact

From Impact to Inserat to the legendary Schmalfette Grotesk all belong to a group of typefaces designed from the mid 50s to the mid 60s known as Realist Sans

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?

Comic Sans is not only more often then not inappropriately used, its design is poor, disjointed design

Why Times New Roman?

CSS Typography and Vertical Rhythm

Relative to font-size i.e. proportional line-height

Logos vs Logotypes

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?