Font Porn?

all fonts depicted here were found at dafont.com

I guess there is such a thing as font porn. And a font addiction. I woke up this morning groggy, bleary eyed and disoriented as if I'd been drinking all night at the club. My memories were vague about what exactly I was doing. There were a ton of songs in my head all jumbled around like 40 people at karake all singing a different song at the same time. Chaos. Then I opened my computer to install a "few" fonts and found that I downloaded an astonishing 30 fonts in one sitting.

Normally I just add fonts as the project dictates. But something about yesterday....

Oh I know. I started out sorting them and making exemplar pages for the categories. PicMonkey has a  new Hub feature where I can store information and have it at a glance. If I know the style I want I can just look at that page instead of scrolling, scrolling, scrolling...   At some point I realized one collection of styles was bit thin. Since my exemplars were supposed to be pretty as well I decided to beef up the selection. And then it was midnight. This morning I saw what I had done.

Thirty fonts. Thirty. I only installed a few today. The rest are sorted into a folder "to be installed" later. I'd like to blame Ed Benguiat. I sorted a page called "@the Movies". It will be later in this post. Remembered that Stranger Things bothered me because I knew the font but the name slipped my mind. So I looked it up. And then realized to my horror that it was one of the fonts that went missing with my latest Windows. I LOVE BENGUIAT! Loved it since design school. And I had to have it back. THAT! That is what started the whole thing.

And then I remembered Fritz. Absolutely love Fritz Quadrata. It is seldom used now, assuming it found stagnation a decade ago and just fell out of favor. But I still love it. So I started a collection of Quadratas in its honor. Little did I suspect all of the interesting places that a Quadrata would show up. Note the very "pirate-y" looking 1492 Quadrata.

And that beautiful Benguiat. You can't beat it for readability. Like most of the Old Masters of Type, the reading is the key. If I can't tell what a word is at a glance I won't like that font. And there are a lot of fonts to dislike out there. Be grungy but do not obfuscate. Thus I love the Angelica War at the top. Grungy and Readable!!! Best of all... you can make any letter at the start or finish with a swirly flourish! Genius.  Ginga is readably grungy too. I love that about these two fonts. And I wish there was more of it around. But you have to buy a commercial license for those and apparently businesses are too cheap to pay. I get hobby bloggers like me not paying for commercial licenses but businesses can write those off. Oh well. I'll have to popularize them myself.

I'm also low on brush scripts. I've been getting the free ones at Creative Market but I couldn't pass up Bakery when I saw it. With a solid selection of brush script there should be enough for me to work with for a while. But I'm not holding my breath on that one either. I'm sure I will find more to love.

Northumbrian, which for whatever reason I hear in Richard Armitage's voice, is one of those crisp, legible uncial letter forms that crosses cultures, Celtic, Viking, German, Roman, or Dwarven. At once Ancient and modern, there is a good deal that can be done with this one. I think that is what I like best about this particular uncial. When I look at it standing firm like so many soldiers upon a hill I see scenes from movies and books that I have read. It is a font full of memories.

Speaking of memories, Pilot and Strong Glasgow remind me of old favorites. Pilot looks very Calvin and Hobbes. And Strong Glasgow, which is undoubtedly based on Rennie MacIntosh's gorgeous craftsman style font Willow, reminds me of my friend Michelle. She developed a series of stamps around the Craftsman movement theme with Willow as the main typeface as well as the inspiration. Of course it also conjures American Horror Story. Yikes.

Jefferson adds to my handwriting collection. I missed out on Monet when it came out but PicMonkey had Santos Durant to sort of make up for it in their collection. Jane Austen will come next to round out the quill pen fonts without famous attribution that I have.

Which brings us to the funny little display font called SCIRCLES. It is very steampunk. It is also a bit Art Nouveau leading into the Art Deco thing. And that is where I am art artistically again. I am loving the late Nouveau and the Art Deco stuff. You can attribute this to all of the Mysteries I've been watching. Which were also the mysteries that I was reading as a kid. As a kid, the typesetting in those books made as much an impact as the stories. There wasn't an industry standard like there is today. Each publishing house had its own set of type styles. You knew by the look and the feel of the book as much as by the imprint logo in the face page.

Today Times Roman is the standard or some Arial nonesense. It is rare that I find a book with a unique print and I notice it. And invariably those are the books that I love best. This is one of the reasons that I am slow, nay, reluctant to hit the ebook trend. Never mind that I could save room with digital books. You don't get the whole body experience with digital books. Every sense is engaged when I read. I miss that.

I am hoping that this current obsession/love affair with typesetting leads my back to reading. I enjoyed the last book tremendously. It is such a sensory experience for me that I think the overload of the last two years just made it impossible for me to sit through whole books. Magazines have been easier. Still.... fonts. Typestyles. The printed word....