Just My Type: A Book About Fonts
A hugely entertaining and revealing guide to the history of type that asks, What does your favorite font say about you? Fonts surround us every day, on street signs and buildings, on movie posters and books, and on just about every product we buy. But where do fonts come from, and why do we...
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A hugely entertaining and revealing guide to the history of type that asks, What does your favorite font say about you? Fonts surround us every day, on street signs and buildings, on movie posters and books, and on just about every product we buy. But where do fonts come from, and why do we need so many? Who is responsible for the staid practicality of Times New Roman, the cool anonymity of Arial, or the irritating levity of Comic Sans (and the movement to ban it)?Typefaces are now 560 years old, but we barely knew their names until about twenty years ago when the pull-down font menus on our first computers made us all the gods of type. Beginning in the early days of Gutenberg and ending with the most adventurous digital fonts, Simon Garfield explores the rich history and subtle powers of type. He goes on to investigate a range of modern mysteries, including how Helvetica took over the world, what inspires the seeming ubiquitous use of Trajan on bad movie posters, and exactly why the all-type cover of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus was so effective. It also examines why the "T" in the Beatles logo is longer than the other letters and how Gotham helped Barack Obama into the White House. A must-have book for the design conscious, Just My Type's cheeky irreverence will also charm everyone who loved Eats, Shoots & Leaves and Schott's Original Miscellany.
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Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9781592406524 (1592406521)
Publish date: September 1st 2011
Publisher: Gotham
Pages no: 356
Edition language: English
I really did enjoy this book, a short history of some fonts, quite readable, a bit idiosyncratic but enjoyable and fun. Simon Garfield has his opinion about some of the fonts, that I don't essentially agree with but it was an interesting read none-the-less. Some of the shennagins about some fonts ...
Updated - 7/9/13 - see link at bottomI am hardly a monogamous sort. I find that I am regularly attracted to different types. Sometimes I like them with big bowls. I am definitely fond of zaftig with strokable, curvy edges, sometimes I prefer something a bit more conservative, upright, familiar. And ...
Excellent Book! Informative and with wit
I really did enjoy this book, a short history of some fonts, quite readable, a bit idiosyncratic but enjoyable and fun. Simon Garfield has his opinion about some of the fonts, that I don't essentially agree with but it was an interesting read none-the-less. Some of the shennagins about some fonts we...
You may ask why so many different typefaces. They all serve the same purpose but they express man's diversity. It's the same diversity we find in wine. I once saw a list of Medoc wines featuring 60 different Medocs all of the same year. All of them were wines but each were different from the oth...