"Don’t forget to draw all of the characters a good font needs! That means punctuation, tildes, accents, parentheses and brackets, and numerals. You’ll also want to include obscure characters like the thorn and eth."
- Alec Julien
"So you want to create a font"
The quote above came from a post on one of my favorite web resources, I Love Typography, and illustrates what amounts to a quintessential difference between high-quality and more dubiously designed fonts. In a previous post I spent time discussing the beauty of free, unrestricted fonts and I stand by the fact that there are many wonderful fonts out there. It's just that you really have to dig around to find the good stuff; even then, a lot of really nice free fonts are missing essential characters and this can obviously pose a number of problems. This brings me to I Love Typography and the simple beauty of sometimes paying for that certain perfect resource. The web site contains a bar running down the right-hand side of the page with featured fonts; new choices are added each month. All of the fonts are clearly high quality (whether they are useful for a specific project or not) and this is a big deal. They tend to have the full range of characters and they are just better-constructed than a lot of the free resources out there. Giorgio Sans, for instance; you would never get that for free and for the right application it would be well worth the $50.
I Love Typography is much more than just a resource for discovering fonts, however, and has many, many useful articles. The topics range from choosing typefaces, readability issues, and "best font" spotlights to articles on the history of various typefaces. The content is definitely written in an easy and enjoyable style and the web site itself is simple and elegant. When various article contributors mention that fonts should enhance (not impede) communication, it is an easy idea to buy into because the web site design showcases this concept beautifully. The text is black on either a white or beige background, which provides a perfect space to showcase the pictures and fonts described in the articles. A splash of color is added by repeating the muted orange (from a small graphic in the logo) across the top of the page and in the section headings. The footer is a beautiful contrast with white and orange text on a black background. And that's it-black, white or beige, orange, and gray. Far from boring, however, the layout capitalizes on just the right balances of color and negative space. The articles can get lengthy (for a web page), especially if you read the comments, so choosing a light surface was smart. It is easy on the eyes and that translates into staying around to click through the archives. In fact, I am thinking about my own blog page and seriously reconsidering my dark background, light text combination. I really like that look, but the postings are a little lengthy and numerous to support that style, I think. White on black is fine for shorter content, but it can get tiring to read after a while. Anyway, I Love Typography got their design just right. The only caveat here is that I dislike that some pages employ the white background and others the beige. This breaks the unity of the web site just a bit because the choice of which color is used seems arbitrary; it doesn't seem to be according to subject and it definitely isn't according to posting date.
Check out the website here:
http://ilovetypography.com/
And don't miss this article specifically geared at Web typography (the Designview/* example is gorgeous minimalist website; definitely click there!):
http://ilovetypography.com/2007/09/19/15-excellent-examples-of-web-typography/
Typographica is another web resource with some great reviews of typography. Why is the review important? Because if you can't quite wrap your head around what to think about a font someone else has picked it apart already. And the critiques are honest ones:
"If we compare Candy with Kobayashi’s Lithium, it looks inappropriate to name them as descendants of that 'vision of the future' which implied an entirely different concept."
- Claudio Piccinini
This website was apparently redesigned in 2009, and has some evidence of new content (two articles from 2010, a few reviews from 2009), however a lot of reviews seem to be from 2007 and 2008. For instance, under the feature tab, "Typefaces of 2008" is the latest article of this kind. This is still a really good resource, but perhaps not the most timely if you are looking for the very latest in font reviews and information. Fortunately I am not, so this website is current enough.
The website itself, much like I Love Typography, is minimal in design. This helps to make the featured fonts stand out. The actual typefaces employed by the website for the body, logo, and headings are diverse, and yet they work together, which is a testament to judiciously chosen variety. Additionally, the navigation structure is perfect. Users can choose between designers, foundries, and classifications, which makes this perfect for experienced users (that would actually look for a particular type designer) or amateurs who might only know a category such as serif. I really love the option to search by foundry as well because users can start to see patterns develop. For example, I noticed that two attractive fonts, Paperback and Luxury, were both distributed by House Industries. I then searched that foundry and located Studio Lettering, a nice script font. The point here is that this opens up a whole new searching and sorting method that allows users to become familiar with high-quality distributors. While the specific font choices on this web site might be somewhat limited, you can then search elsewhere for resources by a designer or distributor that you already know you like. A great way to start learning the ins and outs of the type world.
Check out Typographica here:
http://typographica.org/
I'll dedicate another post to more online typography resources since there are a lot of worthwhile websites and each one deserves a fair discussion. As for this post, just looking through these sites has reminded me that free resources are awesome, but sometimes you just get what you pay for. I may have to invest in a few gorgeous fonts for my website (and then pine over the many more that I can't afford).
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