23 Fun Font Facts

I recently finished reading Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield.

Because I’m a big enough nerd to read (and enjoy) a book about fonts, I’m certainly a big enough nerd to take (and share) notes on what I learned.

You’re welcome.

1. Guttenburg printed the first Bible in a font known as Textura.
2. The Declaration of Independence was printed in Caslon. Ironically, Caslon was a popular British font.
3. Vincent Connare created Comic Sans for Microsoft in 1994. Much to his own chagrin.
4. Eric Gill designed the popular font Gills Sans, but was also an extreme sexual deviant (think incest and bestiality). Yikes.
5. Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class at Reed College, which inspired him to including many fonts choices on the first Mac computers.
6. IKEA switched from Futura to Verdana in 2009. People were not happy.
7. Three of the most readable fonts are: Bembo, Bodoni and Garamond.
8. Italics was invented by an Italian.
9. The Doves font was thrown into the Thames river in 1908 by it’s inventor to prevent his business partner from taking it from him.
10. British designer Mathew Carter created some of the popular modern fonts, including Verdana, Georgia, Bell Centennial and Tahoma.
11. The ampersand (&) is a combination of the letters ‘e’ and ‘t’— because ‘et’ is Latin for ‘and’.
12. Coming Together is a font of just ampersands.
13. The interrobang (‽) is a punctuation mark combining the question mark & exclamation point.
14. Two of the most universal fonts of all time, Helvetica and Univers, were both created in Switzerland in 1957. Helvetica is Latin for ‘Switzerland.’
15. Helvetica is so ubiquitous that one man tried to spend a day without interacting with the font. It was more difficult than you’d think.
16. Arial is essentially a copy of Helvetica.
17. The Nazis believed only traditional gothic text—such as Fraktur— could express the purity of the nation.
18. In response to that, Futura designer Paul Renner protested the Nazis. The Germans called Futura ‘the font of our time’.
19. Gotham came to fame because of its use during the Obama presidential campaign.
20. Hermann Zapf— creator of Palantino, Optima and Zapfino—was an outspoken advocate for font rights.
21. Paul Felton wrote a book on The Ten Commandments of Type, which also explains how to commit font heresy.
22. A panagram is a sentence that uses all of the letters of the alphabet (eg. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.)
23. Handgloves is the word commonly used to display and compare fonts.