Greetings, fellow readers! I'm taking a break from the midterm crunch to share my one of my nerdy guilty pleasures with you: my obsession with typography. If you're the kind of person who has ever cringed over a paper typed in Comic Sans or debated the benefits of serif versus sans-serif fonts, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If not, welcome to my world!
Typography has a long and fascinating history. I've been learning a lot about it in my Internet Literature class. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit I've come across is the story of Aldus Manutius, a 15th century Italian printer and humanist whose accomplishments include inventing italic type, standardizing the modern appearance and use of commas and semicolons, and creating the first paperback books. Together with his friend Francesco Griffo, Manutius created at least five different typefaces which are still used today.
I even found this little "What typeface are you?" quiz the other day. I got Garamond, so naturally I did some digging into the history of the font. It is named after Claude Garamont, a Belgian printer who became prominent in the 1540's after the French king Francis I commissioned him to create a Greek typeface. I learned that Garamond is considered one of the most legible and eco-friendly (in terms of efficient ink usage) of all typefaces used in print applications. Also, the Hunger Games trilogy, the Dr. Seuss stories, and the American editions of the Harry Potter series are all set in different variations of Garamond.
Dave Eggers, editor of the beloved journal McSweeney's, stated that one of his goals was to use only the font Garamond 3 in the journal "because it looked good in so many permutations—italics, small caps, all caps, tracked out, justified or not." Maybe I'll do the same and make Garamond the official font of all my writings and correspondence!
What's your type? Click on the link below to take the quiz, and let me know in the comments what you learn about your font!
http://www.buzzfeed.com/alannaokun/what-font-are-you
Until next time,
Anna
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