Building Fonts

When the combination of WYSIWYG graphical user interfaces, scalable fonts, laser printers and desktop publishing software started to make its presence felt at the end of the 1980s it was a time of serious typeface abuse in newsletters, invitations and home-made greetings cards. It seems everyone wanted to go and put as many jarring and clashing typefaces on a page as they could. Some of my friends even when to far as to use things like Fontographer to create their own typeface variants, but then they tended to be over-zealous about things like that (and actually read up on things like kerning etc.) (Of course, all that came in useful when we had a couple of assignments in computer graphics class writing Postscript by hand to generate graphic objects and in order to understand how a Postscript laser printer or Sun’s NeWS GUI worked.)

(Equivalent things to this typeface abuse still happens today in Powerpoint presentations you encounter every now and then, along with the evil that is the blink tag in web pages.)

Anyway, the other day I saw this news article, F is for do-it-yourself fonts - Stuff.co.nz, which pointed over to FontStruct | Build, Share, Download Fonts. This is a web site that allows you to design your own typefaces and share them with the world. Suddenly it’s 1986 all over again.

Related link: At some point I want to see the film, Helvetica, as I’m always intrigued by the effort and history that lurks in the stories about things like typefaces.