Who says magnetic letters are just for kids?

Name that font.

Re: Typographic Overload; or, “Do we really need more fonts?”

I just read a piece in the current issue of Computer Arts magazine by Jason Arber of pixelsurgeon.com about what he calls “typographic overload”.

He has a theory that “there exists an international cabal of typographers with a secret agenda to stop honest designers like you and me from doing our jobs, by clogging up our already buzzing heads with a myriad of [font] choices”.

According to his theory, the evil font designers of the world are trying to hold him back from his job by forcing him to wade through thousands of font samples for hours and hours. And he wants it to stop: “Let’s draw a line in the sand and send a message to these evil purveyors of type, telling them that we have enough fonts…”

He reassures himself by debunking the necessity for new typefaces: “Surely we have enough fonts by now. Do we really need another version of Garamond, another clean sans serif, another pixel font, or another handwritten font, for crying out loud?”

(Ironically enough, there is an article 8 pages later in the magazine featuring the type designer Gerben Dollen and his new font, RES.)

To answer Mr Arber and the rest of the people who have and will ever ask if we really need more fonts:

Yes yes yes yes yes! In fact, I would say we need more (bring ‘em on)!

As long as there are new design problems, there should always be new design answers. In many cases, the answer includes a new font! Even when there aren’t new problems, there are surely always better ways to approach the old ones.

Compare fonts with cars, for instance (I love comparing fonts with other things). The problems of driving from Point A to Point B have changed very little in the past 50 years, but you don’t see automobile manufacturers ceasing to innovate on existing standards, do you? Classic cars are always cool (I drive one myself), but for those who require such things, modern cars make use of new technologies, are much more efficient, comfortable (though that’s arguable), and relevant to current styles. The same goes with fonts.

But I rest my case. It is clear that Mr Arber’s article was written with a tone of sarcasm and sensationalist humor, and I don’t want anyone to think I took him too seriously. Regardless: stagnation of new font designs is not the solution to regaining the hours lost in your font searches.

MY theory (for what it’s worth) is that we don’t need less fonts; what we need is a better means by which to FIND our fonts. The problem doesn’t lie in the constant innovation of typefaces, but in the lack of innovation in the tools we use to find them.

The next time I see a list of fonts arbitrarily sorted alphabetically, I am going to puke up a huge ball of the dust that’s been forced down my throat ever since I started looking at type specimens! If I don’t know the name of the font that’s sitting there waiting to be the perfect solution to my design problem, how the hell am I going to know that it’s name starts with a T?! By wasting my time with everything from A–S? And even then, how will I know that U–Z doesn’t have a better solution?

When was the last time you chose to read a book because its title began with a C?

Even if fonts are sorted by their concrete formal qualities or historical design information (both of which can be helpful sorting methods), I am limited to what I THINK I want. If there’s a better solution to my problem that exists outside of my pre-conceived set of guesstimated guidelines, then I want to see it!

I think it’s time for us to embrace this amazing thing called “digital technology” and use it to our sorry font-needing advantage. Dynamic sorting systems that utilize qualitative keywords and other detailed tags are much more likely to return relevant results than the antiquated systems our forefathers used to browse their limited physical libraries hundreds of years ago. Those methods worked fine when people had a few dozen fonts at their immediate disposal, but designers nowadays (as Mr Arden points out) have tens—maybe hundreds—of thousands of choices.

I thought hard about this topic for my graphic design senior degree project at MassArt, and continue to do so now in my work at MyFonts. Given that, I’m probably a bit more worked up about this subject than most people. However, that’s still no excuse to make already sleepless designers wade through endless lists to find what they need. People shouldn’t have to find fonts, the fonts should find the people.

Cloudy Kanji

I checked the Yahoo!® weather report this morning to find this lovely 10pt anti-aliased kanji:

Fortunately the little cloud makes it clear, but without that I would be hard-pressed to figure out what that character on the left is. Here is a blown-up version:

Very helpful. Here is what the actual characters look like at full resolution in Hiragino, the default “CJK” (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) font for Mac OS X:

I know that there’s not really anything that can be done for characters this complex at current screen resolutions. In fact, this kanji has 10 horizontal layers which have to be represented in about the same number of pixels, so it’s amazing that the anti-aliasing can give any sense of the character at all. But I was still amused at just how unreadable it was, even if you know what the character is supposed to look like. As someone who is only just starting to learn kanji, I wouldn’t even be able to determine the layout of the character so I could look it up in a book.

Incidentally, here’s what it looked like when I turned off the system anti-aliasing:

In some ways better, in some ways worse. The 10 layers have been condensed into 6 by the strategic removal of “redundant” lines. I’m glad I’m not the guy that had to hint this.

Steven Hill’s amazing title screen pages

Anyone interested in lettering will probably enjoy shillPages—an amazing collection of movie title screen shots.

Here are just a few samples from his gigantic collection:

I also like to use WhatTheFont to test the title screens against what we have in the MyFonts database. I can get some interesting results too if i use titles that are obviously handlettered / not made with existing fonts (the simplest ones work best).

Type From The Crypt

Disclaimer: While the timing of this article seems fittingly close to Halloween, I genuinely just like horror-related stuff; I would just as soon have posted it on Christmas or Mother’s Day. With that being said…

I recently bought the complete Tales From The Crypt box set, and have since been reading through story after story, like a 10-year-old on a sugar high. Zombies, werewolves, murderous scandal and grave-robbing now fill my dreams.

Many people are unaware that Tales From The Crypt was originally a comic book published in the 1950s by EC Comics. It wasn’t until decades later, in 1989, that the popular HBO television series was launched.

Until Fredrich Werham’s Seduction of the Innocent and the subsequent establishment of the Comics Code in 1954, horror and crime comics were huge in the United States. Tales From The Crypt was one of many such titles, like EC’s Vault of Horror and Haunt of Fear, to fly off of newsstands and into the sweaty little palms of pre-pubescent boys all over the country.

One of my favorite elements of Tales From The Crypt (not surprisingly) is the amazing, exclamation-point-laden, hand-rendered lettering. It isn’t especially unique that a horror comic would have sensationalist type styles, but I still find myself getting super-excited whenever I think a character is about to let a blood-curdling scream loose…comic book characters’ words always look way cooler when they are being attacked or otherwise terrified.

Another unique chance for the creepy lettering styles to shine is on the title page for each story. Generally these pages have a large, horrific image with big title lettering to get you psyched up for the “yarn” which is about to unfold.

I can’t help but wonder how these sensational displays of lettering were affected, if at all, by the Comic Code’s assertion that “…words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden”. I may just be reading too far into things, but it does seem to me that the lettering on story title pages became slightly subdued in Tales From The Crypt as the censorship pressures began to build.

These kinds of comics have influenced many modern-day type designers in creating their own digital fonts. While working on the MyFonts site, I often search for things like horror and monster to test different functions. In doing so I’ve inadvertently become quite familiar with this genre of fonts.

One of the main problems in emulating hand-lettering with a digital font comes about when spelling out words, like HORROR, that have multiple occurrences of the same letter. If all the Rs are exactly the same, it will become obvious that a digital font was used. Most of the better examples of hand-lettering fonts retain some of their organic quality by including alternate versions of the same letter. This allows for more of the variation which occurs naturally in true hand-lettering.

Some fonts, like Typodermic’s Croteau, take advantage of some of the more advanced features in the OpenType font format by offering a large amount of custom letter-pair ligatures. These allows an even broader range of variation, further helping to prevent obvious letterform repetition.

While many foundries offer fonts similar in style to the lurid horror comic style of the ’50s, there are a few foundries that focus specifically on comic lettering. Comicraft and Blambot are excellent examples of font foundries who offer more than just one or two variations on this theme.

Below are a few samples of some of the fonts I’ve come across on MyFonts that I think speak the same or similar language to the Tales From The Crypt style of the ’50s.

If you like these and want to see more, check out the album of related fonts I’ve put together at MyFonts. Also, check out this gallery of Classic Crime & Horror Covers (highly recommended!).

PS: Happy Friday the 13th!

Type on the Japanese Street

I’ve been living in Japan for a few months now (my wife is an English teacher here) and it’s been very interesting getting familiar with the complex Japanese writing system. There are three “alphabets” (not counting the Roman characters used in many places) which are intermixed freely everywhere you look.

Japanese signage and writing style are fascinating in their variety. As in any other language, the styles vary from antique brush strokes to kitschy 50s sci-fi abstract to handwritten “cursive” that’s all but unreadable to the foreigner’s eye.

I’ve taken a few shots around town with my mobile phone camera to capture some of the interesting typographic tidbits I’ve noticed. I haven’t been as industrious as I had hoped, so I will also note here an interesting site that was pointed out to me by a Japanese friend who is one of the very active font identifiers on our WhatTheFont Forum.

Taquet’s Hatena Diary (English translation) is a Japanese blog devoted to showing photographs of type use in Japanese signage. Some notable recent samples:

	Typical boring sans combining all four alphabets: hiragana, katakana, kanji, and English.
	Rustic harvest font. This is katakana, the alphabet used for onomatopoeia and words of foreign origin. This one just says Harvest Fair: haabesuto fea.
	Avant garde “stylish” style. This is also katakana (”teatoru taimuzusukuea”) for Theatre Times Square.
	Kind of rough old-printing-press style being used to advertise… a banana dessert. Vertical Japanese is read top-to-bottom, right-to-left. The first two kanji (top right) are east and capital, otherwise known as Tokyo.

And now a few of my own from around town.

	Six renditions of the kanji for “eternity” — very similar to “water” 水.
	This ubiquitous sign is the brand of a delivery service. I enjoy how the cat logo at the top is simultaneously cute and disturbingly evil. Note the clever representation of the middle kanji (”hurry” 急) with the lower strokes turned into little running feet.
	Water 水 and tree 木 are drawn quite differently and normally look nothing alike. But in this blocky type, the only difference between them is the thin separation between the central vertical stroke and the “arms” — a clever representation.

Law and Order Special Letters Unit

Font identification, Muppet style:

Oct. 2006 Design Trends: Scary Fonts

Need Halloween fonts for invitations, posters, or flyers? MyFonts has a whole slew of text and picture fonts for your next scary event.

Beynkales from Scriptorium is based on the original title of Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride. Burton was using an outdated version of one of Scriptorium’s fonts for the interior titles. Scriptorium’s quest to get hold of Burton didn’t bear any immediate fruit, but in a totally unrelated event they were contacted by the graphic arts company working with the overseas distributors for The Corpse Bride, and it turned out that they needed a font based on the main title of the movie so they could keep the same style when they retitled it into other languages. The font was created from the sample in the original title. Scriptorium ended up calling it “Beynkales,” which means “Bone Bride” in Yiddish. So here it is in all its tattered glory!

Braaains BB is a monster collection of 53 all-original, all-terrifying zombie illustrations. Also included is a character map so you can pick that perfect undead dingbat!

Draculon is a casual font inspired by the letterforms of a humanistic font from 1904, which was in turn based on an Italian manuscript from 1485. The subject of the manuscript was probably something about vampires and pirates or even worse: the dreaded vampirates. Draculon is available in OpenType, Mac PostScript and Windows TrueType format. (Note: the OpenType format includes class-based kerning, common fractions, and 46 ligatures. Automated OpenType ligatures currently only work in Adobe CS products.)

Ahoy, matey! Catacumbes is a collection of skulls and bones, bones and skulls, and even a headless skeleton to put them all atop. Use them big on signs and posters.

Monster Mash is one of many Halloween fonts from Comicraft, which also include Goosebumps, Incy Wincy Spider, Rough Tongue, and Trick Or Treat, to name but a few.

Check out our scary fonts for all your Halloween events!

October 2006 Rising Stars

Every month we add new, innovative fonts and sign up new foundries. In the October 2006 issue of Rising Stars, we show you our top-selling new fonts.

Witchfinder comes in three packages. You’ll find a font digitized from an original manuscript, a contemporary version of the digitized script, a witch alphabet, and all kinds of alchemy, astrology, and witch icons. We can see them all used together to create great poster art, but we particularly like the contemporary script.

Fantini is a fun and curly font bridging the psychedelics of the 1960s with the flirtatious flair of the 1970s like no other face does. Elements of psychedelia and funk flare out and intermix crazily to create cool, swirly letters packed with a lot of joy and energy. We especially like Fantini Pro, the OpenType version, which packs all 5 styles into one font. It’s like basically way cool.

Sundial is a clean straightforward design that comes in four weights: Regular, Shadow, Sans, and Sans Shadow. We like combining the weights on different layers to create drop shadow and bevel effects.

Diva Doodles Too is a new release that complements the success of the original Diva Doodles. This picture font includes clothes, purses, shoes, jewelry, bikinis, hats, flowers, and cocktails — all drawn in a playful style.