Let’s Talk About Fonts!

Welcome To Cora’s Corner, where every month I am going to help you with your artwork issues.

This month I’m going to discuss fonts (typefaces).

On 12 June 2005, a fifty-year-old man stood up in front of a crowd of students at Stanford University and spoke of his campus days at a ‘lesser institution’ — Reed College in Portland, Oregon. ‘Throughout the campus,’ he remembered, ‘every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.’At the time, the student, who would later drop out of college, believed that nothing he had learned would find a practical application in his life. But things changed. Ten years after his college experience, that man, by the name of Steve Jobs, designed his first Macintosh computer, a machine that came with something unprecedented — a wide choice of fonts. As well as including familiar types such as Times New Roman and Helvetica, Jobs introduced several new designs, and had evidently taken some care in their appearance and naming. They were named after cities he loved, such as Chicago and Toronto. He wanted each of them to be as distinct and beautiful as the calligraphy he had encountered a decade earlier, and at least two of the fonts — Venice and Los Angeles — had a handwritten look to them.

It was the beginning of something — a seismic shift in our everyday relationship with letters and with type. An innovation that, within another decade or so, would place the word ‘font’ — previously a piece of technical language limited to the design and printing trade — in the vocabulary of every computer user. Excerpt: Just My Type by Simon Garfield

Steve Jobs past away last Month. To say he had an impact on me personally is an understatement. I am an Apple User. Apple and Adobe, Steve Jobs and Walt Disney are responsible for who I am and what I do for a living today. Walt Disney told me to dream big and Steve Jobs gave me the tools to make those dreams come true. Thank you.

Back to my main subject, FONTS. Fonts can make or break a design. As an artist, you can never have enough fonts available to you. One reason is the customer always finds the one you don’t have. Because of the multitude of choices available to a customer from numerous sources, it is always very helpful if the customer can provide the font file or at the very least the font name and where they saw it from. As the customer this could save you money. I know I spend a tremendous amount of time doing font searches. The other issue besides having to pay for the artist time to search for fonts is not all fonts are free to use. Some fonts have licensing fees. If you are flexible, many free fonts are close to the commercial ones and can be substituted.

Picking the right font for your design especially if it’s your logo or brand, is critical. It is as important as color and other elements that are in your design. Decide what you want the font to convey. Is your design fun and whimsical, bold, delicate or athletic? The font you pick will help make those statements.

I would also like to hear from you about your most pressing issues about artwork. Your question may be used in a future issue of this newsletter. If you have questions, please email me at cora.kromer@qdigitizing.com. And please reference this newsletter.

Looking forward to sharing an exciting journey of discovery into the world of Art.

Sincerely,

Cora Kromer

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