Just My Type

I supported myself in graduate school in part by working as a typesetter. The work was tedious but relatively lucrative (compared to writing for The Daily Californian for five cents per column inch); what kept me engaged were the typefaces themselves, and especially their names, each of which suggested a rich history: Futura Condensed, Broadway, Bookman, Canterbury, Times Roman, Helvetica. If I were setting type today I'd have hundreds more fonts to choose from, with far more inventive names. I keep in touch by means of the MyFonts.com e-newsletter, which each month delivers a fresh batch of funky, elegant, or mysterious typefaces along with well-written stories about type designers. Here are a few of the font names that have caught my eye lately:

How to Consume Oxygen, created by Vic Fieger "with the plan of emulating words written on a fluted-steel ‘warehouse’-type door in advanced state of rusting."

Jaunty Gent, by Nick's Fonts, "a rollicking, righteously retro romp."

State Evidence, by Astigmatic, "made from vintage typewriter samples and meticulously compiled into a complete character set."

Witchfinder, by Die Typonauten, which includes symbols from alchemy, astrology, and demonology.

Zushboy, from PizzaDude.dk, "spaced tight in order to copycat a real homeboy’s handwriting!"

By the way, the ubiquitous Helvetica typeface celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year. A new documentary about Helvetica had its world premiere last week at SXSW, and in its honor the Manage This blog is sponsoring a contest for the best font-related haiku. Deadline is Friday, March 23. My favorite submission so far, from DJM:

i shot the serif

left him there full of leading

yearing for kerning

That's a whole lot of word play in seventeen syllables! For the uninitiated, "leading" (rhymes with "bedding") is the space between lines of type; "kerning" refers to space adjustments between letters. There are excellent explanations of these terms and more here and here.

Update: Just looked at this post online. I have no idea why the haiku looks so squirrelly. It's only three lines here in Typepad.

Second update: Aha! Got it.

Comments

[Vicki]

A couple of my first jobs were as a typesetter... loved it. I remember when buying a new font strip was almost as good as buying new shoes!

[mike]

To my great pleasure, I was able recently to bore a young'un around here with an expansive explanation of the (at least purported) etymology of the words "uppercase" and "lowercase."

[Nancy]

Mike -- I hope you remembered to tell the young 'un the derivation of "mind your p's and q's," another bit of typesetting esoterica.

[anne]

Oh man, I did the typesetting thing too, for a small student-run literary journal at MSU just a smidge before computers made it so much easier. I remember a graduate coming up to me and saying, "Why not use a Macintosh?" A what???