The Fonts You Use

September 11, 2012

Interview with Simon Garfield, author of the book Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

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Mike Carruthers:
Go to write something on your computer and you have a ton of different type styles to choose from. There are over 100 thousand of them in the world with more on the way. Don’t we have enough?

Simon Garfield:
You could say the same argument for love songs or landscape paintings. You think oh well there surely must be enough in the world but actually we are a creative race.
 

Simon Garfield, author of the book Just My Type, says there are certain type styles that most people agree are easy to read.

And those are the ones that we see all the time; Helvetica, Arial, Garamond, and Times New Roman and all of those. And those are the ones that you want to read a lot of material quickly or you’re reading a book. And in books a very popular typeface is Bodoni.

Some type styles were designed specifically to be read more easily on computer monitors.

My favorite one that I use all of the time is Georgia. There’s another one called Verdana and they are designed specifically for computers – but they do resemble things like Times New Roman that actually obviously existed in the real world.

By the way you paid to use those type styles the royalty was built in to the price of the software.

So you would get them free on the computer but the computer company or the software company would have to pay for them, Microsoft or Adobe or similar companies. And then every time they’re sold either to an individual or a big company that big company would have to license it.