Akkam’s Razor

You've just finished the latest flyer for your workplace bowling league, coffee club, or baby shower announcement. It has a mildly humorous title, all the pertinent details, and the obligatory piece of Microsoft Clipart (or something you stole off the web).  

But it still needs … something.

Most people don't even consider the whole culture of typography.  You use whatever is on your computer, usually the default of your word processor or email program, ignorant that there are other choices out their.  Yet all of western civilization, from the Guttenberg Bible and the Movable Type Printing Press to the current day has relied on little characters to convey meaning.  This is also true for the web - despite the emphasis on audio, video, and animation, the web always was and most likely will always be primarily about words.

Every computer, whether Apple, Windows, or Linux, has dozens if not hundreds of different kinds of fonts installed, including "wingdings" & "dingbats".  But, there are infinitely more choices available.  Here's a survey to show you what the most popular fonts that are in use on a variety of systems.

A Friendly Warning:  Just because you CAN use different fonts doesn't mean you SHOULD - think what a document with WAY too much clipart looks like.  Different fonts, colors, and sizes scream cheesiness, especially regarding "professional" communications, like memos, resumes, and newsletters.  And for anyone doing web design, when authoring a website using your favorite non-standard font, anyone who visits your site will see it with their default font, unless they have that same font installed on their PC.  Different fonts will likely only be useful if your being the artistic type, website authoring, graphic illustration, or logo design.  And whatever you do, don't use Comic Sans.

There are also a multitude of font sites on the internet.  For starters, there's FontLeech or FontLover, which are font blogs.   Not sure what font is being used in a given piece of work?  Try WhattheFont.com, which allows you to upload an image, or Identifont or TypeNavigator to answer questions via a wizard, to determine which font was used.  DaFont is a pretty portal that allows you to browse fonts by category, as are SimplytheBest.net and FontFinder.ws.

You can also see the importance of fonts in the branding of products, web sites (Fontshop), music and bands, TV shows and movies, and video games.  There are other sites, such as Blambot (and comicbookfonts), that offer comic book style fonts.  You can view all of the fonts that the Walt Disney Corporation uses in their theme parks and entertainment.  There's another site that has nothing but fonts themed for kids.  There are also graffiti fonts, pirate fonts, grunge fonts, typewriter fonts, stencil fonts, corporations, municipalities, and organizations.  Smackbomb also has food and drinks, sports, automobiles, games, and publications.

For a fun little timewaster, try this Retail Alphabet Game, where you'll have to guess the corporation or product from the logo and font.  There's also this site, Font Fetish, which has a few other font related games.

Of course, if you wanted to, you could make your own font, send away samples of your handwriting and get back a custom-made ($$$) cursive font, or you could design your own font for free online and download it to your PC.

If you're really into the avant garde, you can also check out the various font foundries, where the artists craft their fonts, such as Font Diner, Chank Fonts, Linotype, and the Fontgarden.

Last thing to mention is how do you know which font to use?  Usually, it's whatever font looks best to you.  Well, it turns out that font choice usually has some psychological and behavioral implications - the attractiveness and attention paid to something is linked to the personality of the reader and the "personality" of the font.  This guy observed that that his academic grades on papers was slightly correlated to his choice of fonts.

I hope you enjoyed this - as promised, you can look forward to one of these almost every Friday this year.