… infinitely fascinating, and have been so since I was a kid. They are one (of many) lenses through which one perceives abstract information. And they influence the sentiment attached to what we read, as well as the fluidity with which we absorb it. Aren’t them special? Here I am giving my short list of enjoyable typography links on the Internet, which hopefully make for a pleasant introduction to the business of fonts. My list of links, designers and fonts is significantly non-exhaustive. It is more of a random sample of good things.

It’s only appropriate to mention that our own Donald Knuth has made one of the most significant impacts on modern-day (industrial) typesetting. His work is detailed in his books, however one can get the gist of it in his lecture notes Mathematical Typography (dedicated to George Polya). This article describes two revolutionary ideas. One is the idea that text layout can be cast as a dynamic program. This is taught in many algorithms classes and as simple as it may be, it completely overwrites what was done for hundreds of years beforehand. The second, is the idea of meta font design where a font is specified by a bare-bone description of the letters’ structure and the rest (the style and look) is described using 60-something mathematical parameters (i.e. numbers).

A few fonts of my choice:

• Helvetica by Max Miedinger. No comment necessary
• FF Meta by Erik Spiekermann
• ITC Officina by Erik Spiekermann
• Escrow by Cyrus Highsmith, commissioned and used by the Wall Street Journal
• Moderno FB by David Berlow. This font has the same roots as the all known Computer Modern used in the TeX system
• FF Meta Serif by Kris Sowersby