Daily Times

On 12 June 2005, a 50-year-old man stood up in front of a crowd of students at Stanford University and spoke of his campus days at a “lesser institution” — Reed College in Portland, Oregon. “Throughout the campus,” he remembered, “every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and did not have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science cannot capture, and I found it fascinating.” ?

At the time, the student, who would later drop out of college, believed that nothing he had learned would find a practical application in his life. But things changed. Ten years after his college experience, that man, by the name of Steve Jobs, designed his first Macintosh computer, a machine that came with something unprecedented — a wide choice of fonts. As well as including familiar types such as Times New Roman and Helvetica, Jobs introduced several new designs, and had evidently taken some care in their appearance and naming. They were named after cities he loved, such as Chicago and Toronto. He wanted each of them to be as distinct and beautiful as the calligraphy he had encountered a decade earlier, and at least two of the fonts — Venice and Los Angeles — had a handwritten look to them. ??

It was the beginning of something — a seismic shift in our everyday relationship with letters and with type. An innovation that, within another decade or so, would place the word ‘font’ — previously a piece of technical language limited to the design and printing trade — in the vocabulary of every computer user. You cannot easily find Jobs’s original typefaces these days, which may be just as well: they are coarsely pixelated and cumbersome to manipulate. But the ability to change fonts at all seemed like technology from another planet. Before the Macintosh of 1984, primitive computers offered up one dull typeface, and good luck trying to italicise it. But now there was a choice of alphabets that did their best to re-create something we were used to from the real world. Chief among them was Chicago, which Apple used for all its menus and dialogs on screen, right through to the early iPods. But you could also opt for old black letters that resembled the work of Chaucerian scribes London, clean Swiss letters that reflected corporate modernism Geneva, or tall and airy letters that could have graced the menus of ocean liners New York. There was even San Francisco, a font that looked as if it had been torn from newspapers — useful for tedious school projects and ransom notes. ??

IBM and Microsoft would soon do their best to follow Apple’s lead, while domestic printers (a novel concept at the time) began to be marketed not only on their speed but for the variety of their fonts. These days the concept of ‘desktop publishing’ conjures up a world of dodgy party invitations and soggy community magazines, but it marked a glorious freedom from the tyranny of professional typesetters and the frustrations of rubbing a sheet of Letraset. A personal change of typeface really said something: a creative move towards expressiveness, a liberating playfulness with words. And today we can imagine no simpler everyday artistic freedom than that pull-down font menu. Here is the spill of history, the echo of Johannes Gutenberg with every key tap. Here are names we recognise: Helvetica, Times New Roman, Palatino and Gill Sans. Here are the names from folios and flaking manuscripts: Bembo, Baskerville and Caslon. Here are possibilities for flair: Bodoni, Didot and Book Antiqua. And here are the risks of ridicule: Brush Script, Herculanum and Braggadocio. Twenty years ago we hardly knew them, but now we all have favourites. Computers have rendered us all gods of type, a privilege we could never have anticipated in the age of the typewriter.

Yet when we choose Calibri over Century, or the designer of an advertisement picks Centaur rather than Franklin Gothic (which are both American and both created at the start of the 20th century but are very different from each other), what lies behind our choice and what impression do we hope to create? When we choose a typeface, what are we really saying? Who makes these fonts and how do they work? And just why do we need so many? What are we to do with Alligators, Accolade, Amigo, Alpha Charlie, Acid Queen, Arbuckle, Art Gallery, Ashley Crawford, Arnold Böcklin, Andreena, Amorpheus, Angry and Anytime Now? Or Banjoman, Bannikova, Baylac, Binner, Bingo, Blacklight, Blippo or Bubble Bath? There are more than 100,000 fonts in the world. But why can we not keep to a half-dozen or so — perhaps familiar faces like Times New Roman, Helvetica, Calibri, Gill Sans, Frutiger or Palatino? Or the classic, Garamond, named after the type designer Claude Garamond, active in Paris in the first half of the 16th century, whose highly legible roman type blew away the heavy fustiness of his German predecessors and later, adapted by William Caslon in England, would provide the letters for the American Declaration of Independence.

Typefaces are now 560 years old. So when a Brit called Matthew Carter constructed Verdana and Georgia for the digital age in the 1990s, what could he possibly have been doing to an A and a B that had never been done before? And how did an American friend of his make the typeface Gotham, which eased Barack Obama into the presidency? And what exactly makes a font presidential or American, or British, French, German, Swiss, or Jewish?

(The excerpt is taken from Just My Type by Simon Garfield)

Simon Garfield is a British journalist and non-fiction writer