Just My Type: A Book About Fonts Quotes
"The most important thing is that [typography] conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds."
"No one can say that the O’s roundness appeals to us only because it is like that of an apple or of a girl’s breast or of the full moon. Letters are things, not pictures of things."
"If all letters were exactly the same height they wouldn’t appear so: round and pointed letters would appear shorter."
"Computers have rendered us all gods of type, a privilege we could never have anticipated in the age of the typewriter."
"The main chapters of this book are typeset in Sabon MT 11/15pt. Sabon, a traditional serif font, was developed in the 1960s."
"The correct use of type varies over time."
"Here is the spill of history, the echo of Johannes Gutenberg with every key tap."
"When we choose a typeface, what are we really saying? Who makes these fonts and how do they work?"
"There are more than 100,000 fonts in the world. But why can’t we keep to a half-dozen or so?"
"What if all these combined techniques could be applied to printing?"
"In the past, people who had a very well-defined sense of taste in what they wore or what they drove, didn’t really have any way of expressing their taste in type."
"Every letter of the alphabet must be distinct from each other to avoid confusion."
"But beauty demands discipline. It is possible that the amateur creatively unleashed by the computer may produce something beautiful, but will it work on the page as practical type?"
"But types have their time, and in the middle of the 1990s, at what was still the dawn of the digital age, Vincent Connare set about proving Morison wrong."
"Good type never dies, but there is one notable exception – Doves, the type that drowned."
"The scale of Gutenberg’s achievements is inestimable."
"A book typographer’s job is building a window between the reader inside a room and ‘that landscape which is the author’s words.’"
"The shapes of letters do not derive their beauty from any sensual or sentimental reminiscences."
"Have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."
"The type was cut in London by Edward Prince, who had earlier made typefaces for William Morris at the Kelmscott Press."
"Doves type is most easily recognized by its ample space between letters, a y that descends without a curl, a ligature connecting c and t, and the bottom bowl of its g set at an angle, giving it a sense of motion, like a helicopter tilting at take-off."
"Fearing its use both in shoddy printing and undesirable subject matter, [Cobden-Sanderson] took the entire letter fund to Hammersmith Bridge and threw it in the Thames."
"His Last Will and Testament contained details of how he would ‘bequeath’ Doves type to the river, so it may be washed ‘to and from the great sea for ever and for ever’."
"The finest ampersand, cut by William Caslon, is still alive after almost three hundred years."
"The letters of the alphabet have certain essential forms."
"Every schoolboy who learns the italic script, every townsman who reads the announcements of the Underground railway, everyone who studies the maps attached to modern travel books is seeing in the light of Johnston."
"Johnston’s letters were drawn on tracing paper and then cut in wood."
"Helvetica is a font of such practicality – and, its adherents would suggest, such beauty – that it is both ubiquitous and something of a cult."
"The contributors here, who go under such names as listlessBean and Eyehawk, display vast knowledge, an eagerness to help, and inestimable amounts of bile."
"Each day, as many as a hundred unidentified fonts are posted for identification and anyone can suggest a solution."
"It’s like cooking – you can follow a recipe to the last gram, but if the love isn’t there it’s just flat and bland."
"Words are there to be read – end of story. Once however typomania sets in, it becomes quite a different story."
"I’ve spent my entire life trying to decipher a typeface … and now there’s only time left to say … Life well spent!"
"In my generation I was the nerdiest of the nerds. But now with young kids – there are so many more nerds."
"Letters do not achieve their true beauty when done in haste and discomfort, nor when done with diligence and pain, but only when they are created with love and passion."
"The perfect model for a type letter is altogether imaginary; there is no copy for the designer today except the form created by some earlier artist."
"The essence of the New Typography is Clarity."
"Creativity was simply the force that people who made rules disapproved of."
"By the time Brody got to work on Arena magazine in 1986...his daring visual jokes and eagerness to confound had entered the consciousness of graphic design students throughout the world."
"‘Where is the language of protest now?’ he asks. ‘We have been led to believe that culture was only there as a financial opportunity.’"
"Our main focus was on articulation, so the layout people could use each page as theatre."
"‘Everywhere you go has similar spaces and signs,’ he said. ‘As designers we are complicit in this – we have to look for new ways forward. It’s all about words that we don’t use any more, like revolution and progress.’"
"The Interrobang is an exclamation mark and question mark combined, a ligature looping the curve of the interrogation with the downward force of the expletive."
"The Interrobang is truly the Esperanto of fonts."
"His font designs of 2010 were called Buffalo and Popaganda, huge and beautiful architectural slabs of ink that clamber over each other in the fashionable magazines, always challenging and arresting, never content just to sit there and tell a story."
"Fonts are like cars on the street – we notice only the most beautiful or ugly, the funniest or the flashiest."
"Because the world and its contents are continually changing. We need to express ourselves in new ways."
"The ultimate Cooper Black font, the connoisseur’s choice, is ATF Cooper Hilite, a wet-look 3-D type, created by adding an internal white line."
"Manutius and Griffo later fell out, and there were squabbles over who was responsible for the first italic types."
"This was Mike Parker, the man who should be credited with the great expansion of Helvetica in the United States."
"One of the few examples of successful typeface protection came in 1998, when Adobe won its case against Southern Software Inc and others."
"The other side of the Linotype advertisement contained smaller notices for Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Cuticura Skin Cure and Musgrave’s Ulster Stoves."
"This disharmony wasn’t resolved in the advertising world until the late 1920s, when marketing people slowly awoke to the early possibilities of branding."
"Professional fonts, once hand-drawn by scribes, then hand-cut and hand-tooled and toiled over for months, were now about $2 each."
"There are also several professionally made fonts with music-associated names that have no trademarked link with a band or its music."
"Some of Parkinson’s early work is packaged in the fonts selection provided with Hallmark Card Studio 2010 Deluxe."