Jun
5
I Like That Font and I Cannot Lie (Sung to The Tune of I Like Big Butts)
June 5, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Slate, a place I always can rely upon for literary fetishism, has a great piece about fonts. I do have an emotional relationship to fonts — When I feel tired and lazy I use Courier, need to be professional Times Roman, and poetic Palentino. Now there’s a font I had never heard of, but, well, it gets me excited in an inappropriate way. Hoefler Text, ohhh….
Some more on Hofler Text from Caleb Crain, author, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation
“Obsessing about fonts is a form of procrastination, so of course I have indulged in it ever since I graduated from a TRS-80 Model III to a Macintosh. On my first Macintosh, which was the first Macintosh, my favorite was New York, which Apple seems to have invented as a very loose bitmap approximation of Times New Roman. I was young then and more open to alternatives than I am now, so I was also willing at the time to try Geneva, which looked like an approximation of Helvetica. But I soon turned against sans serif fonts, because they seemed hard to read. My goal has always been a legible font with a neutral personality, as appropriate to flower arranging as to triple homicides. No fussiness and no quirkiness. I have a special abhorrence of squat, bubbly fonts, like whatever it is that the Library of America is typeset in, perhaps because my astigmatism makes such fonts look even pudgier than they actually are. New York was far from perfect – the serifs are too pronounced and give it a higgledy-piggledy look, and its round forms began to look a little too rotund after a while, so I went to Palatino when that was released. Maybe its verticality reminded me of the font for the word Marlboro on the cigarette packages, whose seductively elongated lowercase “l” and “b” still make me wistful after more than a decade of not smoking. Palatino was my font for a long time, but Apple uses it in its advertising, which ruined it in the end. In the last five years, my default has been Hoefler Text, though on the small-pixel screens I have to ask Microsoft Word to magnify the page by 125 percent in order for it to look right to me. It’s polite and unobtrusive. Adjacent letters never touch. The regular, medium weight of the letter forms makes them easy to read, but they are shaped distinctly as letters – no one will mistake them for geometry-class refugees. They’re almost as nice as the type from my defunct Olivetti Lettera 22.”