A Commonplace
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"Quarrels end, but words once spoken never die."

When I was once asked to pick three words to describe myself, I wrote need more words, which only made things worse.

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Font n. \?fänt\

First of all, you ought to use the word typeface instead of font. A font is Times New Roman, 18 point bold. A typeface is a set of letterforms, a feeling conveyed with curves and lines, a meaning that lies in the text’s shadow but remains present nonetheless. The scent worn by the woman you have loved from afar for years, unnameable and unforgettable. Helvetica is plain, frank, sometimes impersonal; Baskerville is dignified and literate. Part of the sense of a typeface comes from its shapes: wide letters seem friendlier, more youthful. Serifs denote seriousness.

But memory is also mixed in with the meaning born in geometry. I see a thick serifed font on the menus at a Quizno’s shop and think of the park road signs along the way to my grandparents’ in Virginia. I see posters for Dollhouse and think of the old Apple IIs sleeping in a computer lab in my elementary school. An MTA bus passes me and I remember the cover of my high school yearbook. These things accrue meaning over time, almost by accident.

I fell in love with typography when I became editor of my high school’s newspaper. It was the era where desktop publishing on the Macintosh was a rare and almost magical thing; there was something eldritch in being able to position a block of text exactly ten picas from the left edge of the paper without using a ruler, in having a machine balance three columns of text so that they were exactly equal in height, in switching between typefaces with a pull-down menu. I learned what kerning, leading, baselines and x-heights — what all these terms meant by fiddling with them in dialog boxes.

My teacher lent me a book on the basics of page layout when I started out. It expected you to lay out page dummies with a grease pencil, to place columns on the page with an X-Acto knife. Any mention of using a computer was left for the appendix, where the author also speculated that in the future our newspapers would personalize themselves to our own tastes and interests. It was one of the few times in my life I felt I was outracing what the world knew.

I set the text of the newspaper in Palatino, a classic, almost regal face. In college, I switched to Bookman. I told myself that I liked how wide Bookman’s characters were, how easy-to-read and friendly they felt while remaining intelligent. But really I chose it because it was the typeface that the Baltimore Sun used then. It was when I loved that paper the most, before Michael Olesker fell from grace and Gregory Kane moved to Washington. It was also when I thought seriously of becoming a journalist, of working for a newspaper — if I was lucky, maybe the Sun. It felt like a noble pursuit then. It felt like something I would love to become.
Somehow, I started to receive catalogs of typefaces in the mail. I don’t know how; I have never bought a single font in my life. Foundries expect that only graphic designers will buy a typeface, so they usually price them in the hundreds of dollars. I instead pored over the catalogs the way I once did hint books for video games I did not own. I imagined buying them — not the gimmicky ones, but the classic ones, the ones that serious designers would use. In my head, I was immersed in them.

I became skilled at identifying typefaces as I walked around the world. When McDonald’s rebranded itself in the late 90s, they used Tekton’s near-handwriting qualities to imply familiarity and openness. Ikea used it on the price signs in their stores for the same reasons. It was a game I would play by myself, a series of signficances no one else seemed to take note of. I think you can find meaning in anything, if you know how to look at it.

I did not become a journalist, and I feel coldly fortunate for it. The Web is where I live now, and it is a vastly different place. The menu of typefaces that you can count upon nearly anyone visiting a page to possess is about ten items long. Adobe’s catalog of typefaces contains around 2,200. I can no longer be picky. I think in terms of serif, sans-serif, and monospaced: generic keywords instead of flavors. I lay things out inexactly. I’m happy when Firefox and Internet Explorer render things roughly the same. I measure things in pixels now, not picas.

I borrow a book from a friend and stare longingly at the pages set in perfect lines of Caslon. What could have been. What has been, and will no longer.

22 June 2009
 


Glass « A Commonplace Glossary / 12:34 am, December 1st, 2009

[...] were good enough. I convinced myself that inaccuracy was another word for warmth. I loved how fuzzy serifed letters grew on a page. I loved the face of a woman I had never met who looked like someone I had not seen [...]