I spent most of today, and a good part of the last few days, browsing through fonts. I remember picking up a book once in a bookstore that was simply a directory of fonts. It had maybe 100 or so fonts in it, and as I was leafing through it, I couldn’t help but shake my head: they were all alike, why even bother?
While I’m nowhere near a designer, I am starting to appreciate the subtler points of typography (and design in general) now. Staring at individual letters still makes me wonder why we need all those little differences, but seeing a few words in them makes it quite obvious. It’s fascinating how a font can give a piece of text its unique feeling: serious or crazy, old-fashioned or modern, retro or retro-modern, etc.
A great starting point is Ray Larabie’s collection of over 250 free fonts (Alan Quatermain pointed me there). Each font has an associated illustration that shows what it can do. It’s quite amazing to see all these different fonts used for mock record covers, menus, etc., and what little it takes to evoke quite vivid impressions of a genre or era.
Another wonderful resource is Typographica, which publishes reviews of fonts. Their Best of 2008 is well worth checking out to see the variety of fonts that are produced today. Some of them are very “showy,” while other work well for printing books. And they all have their own personalities that they transfer to whatever is printed using them.
With all this choice, it’s very difficult to make decisions. But wasting a few hours marveling at all the variations and getting a feeling for the gamut of designs is well worth it.
