Font

 

A new pair of glasses can help return you from 14-point to 12-point reading. Another benefit is being able again to read friends’ emails, those who delight in communicating via party-time 1920s Harlow Solid Italic or the impossibly 1950s font Gigli, all dimples, smiles, and curls. Truly, I am charmed by the lettering, but for comprehension please say it in Calibri. The font Ink Free is true to its name, as Ink Free letters disappear into the background due to a rapid increase in thinness. This is also called communication breakdown. The typeface dropdown list at the top of a digital document has revolutionised printing. But did anyone notice? The clean screen, like the blank page, is the playground of font fans. We can test a text with a vast range of classical, modern, and theme fonts, watching our words stretch pages. Goudy Stout turns our words into a billboard. Wide Latin threatens to break borders all over. On the other hand, tests with text may scrunch our best efforts. Lucida Consolata reduces a page of A4 text to a black window in the top corner. New bifocals won’t help there, not even a magnifying glass. Designers like to invent new fonts, as well, patenting their alphabets in case they become the next big thing, whether downward of 8-point or upward of 72-point. In this world of every lean and lacy letter, it’s no wonder someone has to do some benign enforcement, if only to be understood. Times New Roman is a common default setting and I use it without a second thought when preparing business memos or domestic emails. The words we transcribe with such sterling abandon onto social media are regularised in real time into Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, or Helvetica, whatever our computer’s sans-serif default happens to be. Who knew? Sometimes I wonder and stare at the words I make and try to imagine where they came from. My Garamond phase was like that. This font is named after Claude Garamond, obviously, a 16^th-century Parisian engraver and punchcutter. Every individual letter we write, with or without accents, in modern documents was carefully designed and created by a person called thus, a punchcutter. Punchcutter is not just a job description in a novel by Charles Dickens. If you look closely enough at the social congestion in a Brueghel painting, a punchcutter is working away at a top window, or trudging through the snow for lunch. It was their requirement to fashion out of metal the tiny tin letters that went into printing presses. Much as I like drawing alphabets during lectures, I cannot see myself converting them into tin type for fun and profit. I prefer dropdown menus. Hence, at present I am going through a Bodoni MT phase for bread-and-butter replies to official emails; Cambria for all my writing, it suits my eye contact.