Why Fonts Matter to Me
You really can have nice things!
Somewhere my career took a turn, and now I work with letters. More specifically, for the past fifteen years or so I’ve been working with and for people who make type. On the inside, we call it “the type industry” but you civilians just call them fonts.
A remarkable thing about the type industry is that very few people know that it exists. I always knew fonts were a thing, I think, but I didn’t give them much thought until it became my full-time job to sell them. Today I run a company called Type Network, which offers type from nearly 100 independent designers all around the world.
Many of the people I work with have been involved in type and letters for decades upon decades. In type years, I have the accumulated wisdom and experience of a toddler, and with this topic I am rushing overconfidently towards a flight of stairs.
With sincere apologies to the many who are better qualified, today I will briefly summarize my views on a topic that fascinates me:
What are fonts? Where do they come from? And why do they matter?
The Basics
It’s de rigueur to argue about whether to use the term “typeface” or “font.” On behalf of the type industry, I assure you that it doesn’t matter what you call them. We’ll all be tremendously delighted if you call us at all.
The distinction is a bit like champagne vs wine — it matters most to people for whom you are wrong no matter what you say. Truly, there’s more than one right answer, but none of them will make your slides look less shit.
It does not matter what you call them, but what does matter is who. The fonts installed on your computer were designed and programmed by people who do so for a living. These people are called type designers. They’re often organized in teams or companies called foundries since the time that each letter was cast in molten metal.
Anybody can download an app and make a font. Anyone with enough tattoos and piercings can learn to pull an espresso but there is no comparison to one made by a professional with a lifetime of practice.
Fonts made by professional type designers are a similar. The fonts pre-installed on your computer, for example, were produced to an extraordinary standard of quality and subject to extraordinary scrutiny by the OS maker before they were put there. Commercial-quality fonts, like those offered for sale or subscription by Type Network and many others, are primarily created by professionals who have spent many years learning and practicing the craft before investing yet more years in the creation of their first commercial typeface.
Professionals at Work
There are very good free fonts out there. There is also fine coffee being served right now in a Starbucks inside a Target inside a shopping mall, somewhere in America. People who are passionate about coffee won’t buy it there, probably. Is it because they’re snobs? Maybe. You’re also more likely to find great quality product in an environment where passionate, trained, experienced professionals are at work.
There are far fewer of them out there than we should like. Have you ever met a type designer? I think I have met most of them and they are wonderful people with an eye for detail, and usually a great sense of humor about both the ecstasy and obscurity of type. I guess there are probably less than 10,000 type designers working full-time at their craft world-wide. I hope and believe that number will increase in the coming decade, as more programs graduate more talented young designers and craftspeople.
In my opinion, the relative paucity of the font workforce relates partially to the relative youth of the digital type industry. That’s another topic best left to others, but briefly, you’ll recall that type refers generically to movable letters used for printing in a press. This was pioneered by Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, enabling publishers to produce up to 3,600 pages per workday, which compares favorably to my average output one of about two every seven days.
Digital type — what we now call "fonts” — has only been a commercially viable endeavor since right around the turn of the century. There was no market for fonts at scale until after the Apple Macintosh was introduced in the mid-1980s, followed by another revolution instigated by web fonts and CSS around 2000.
If you want to complain that the type industry has not yet found its place on the modern internet it helped create, well, it’s nothing the other millennials have not heard before.
In the scale of historic figures like Gutenberg, it is astounding to comprehend the impact that digital type has had on our society. By the 1980s, thanks to the genius and labor of thousands of people in hundreds of companies around the world, the meaning of the word “publish” changed forever. With 500 years of aggregated of innovations stacked a mile high, anyone with a computer could make typographic choices specifically tailored to the brand, mood, or the needs of the reader.
They could do that. But mostly, they don’t. Mostly they use Helvetica.
Why Fonts Matter
Fonts matter for a number of obvious, prosaic reasons related to legibility, suitability to purpose, brand, and more. These again are topics best left to others.
Fonts matter to me for reasons that relate to how I approach my work, how I think about my readers or users, and the kind of person I want to be.
There are reasons that I think you should care about fonts, but almost surely do not. Today I’ll talk about those.
Design & Craft
For me the most important reason to care about fonts is related to the idea of craft.
Graphic designers, UX designers, editors, typographers, software developers, and even social media marketers all practice a craft. Mirriam-Webster defines craft as something “requiring manual dexterity or artistic skill.”
To me, another thing that defines a craftsperson is their tools. Here’s an example: I drink coffee every day, but making it is not a craft. I use a department store coffeemaker, and mass-produced brand-name coffee that’s ground in a supermarket coffee grinder.
Others who truly care about their coffee call may take a much different approach, especially including their choice of tools. A carefully-selected boiler, brewer, grinder, tamper… you get my drift.
Professional designers of all types exhibit a similar hallmark: they select high-quality, purpose-made tools made specifically for their craft.
(Another feature craftspeople have in common is rank snobbery about terms and terminology, history, ways and means of production. Each industry has it’s own terroir and each their own terroirists.)
I have noticed while working on motorcycles that I’m still a terrible mechanic even if I buy professional-quality tools. Good tools probably do elevate the quality of my work in some respects. At worst I am less prone to certain errors while making them. Many of you, I am told, buy professional-quality kitchen tools in an effort to elevate the practice of their culinary craft. Your sous vide machine won’t turn you into Harold McGee, but it also won’t burn your steak.
Fonts are kind of like this! Professional-quality tools elevate the work of every practitioner, from amateur to expert. You will rarely find a professional designer — even less likely a professionally-trained or celebrated one — using default system fonts, or free fonts they found on the internet. And if you do, you will surely find them telling everyone of their displeasure about it.
Read This
For me, the most important reason that fonts matter is this: almost everything I make is text. In terms of what the reader will experience, the fonts I use are the most important choice of tool I can make.
Fonts are a design tool — like an architect’s compass or French curve — that impart their quality to the product of their work. A shitty designer like me will not suddenly be a great one because of the font I chose. But I will might get a little bit better!
It’s possible for a total novice to get pretty decent design results with nothing more than a great font. And in competent hands, a great typeface elevates a good idea to a sublime effect.
Made by Hand
Today, virtually all type is made by hand using digital tools. I am not aware of any AI-generated typefaces as yet, but I am eagerly looking forward to ignoring them when they inevitably do come along.
It’s said that a camera does not take the picture, a photographer does. In the same sense, type designers use font design software to create type, but fonts are truly made by hand.
Photographers, too, spend just as much time editing and perfecting photos after they’re taken as they do setting up and capturing the shot. The same is true of fonts — drawing the shape of the letters is only the beginning of the work. If you start to pay attention, you’ll learn a fascinating thing about type: the space between the letters is as important — sometimes more important — than the letters themselves.
A couple more fun font facts: a typeface family is composed of all the related fonts in a typeface, including different weights like regular, bold, bold italic, etc. and widths like expanded or compressed. A complete family might consist of dozens or even hundreds of fonts. Because the work of designing high-quality type is so technical and meticulous, it could take a designer years to complete a family. A large project, like one that includes Asian writing systems, could take a team of dozens of designers many years to finish.
When I use a quality typeface in my work, every letter that appears in that work is influenced by decisions made by a trained, talented craftsperson who has not only considered the exact shape of every letter, but the shape of the space between them.
I enjoy knowing that when I make something like a proposal using a high-quality font, every letter I set has been meticulously crafted by someone who really fucking cares about what they’re doing. That’s a way for me to put my own kind of hallmark on the work I create. I hope it shows1 that I care about what I create, even if I’m working on something that requires a little extra effort to care about.
What Matters Most
I meet a lot of people who say that they’ve always been drawn to fonts, and that they’ve long appreciated the beauty, rhythm, and proportions of nicely-set text. I’ve also met people who’ve said they find it difficult to tell the differences between one font and another.
To me, there’s one idea about fonts that matters most. It came to me via a 2006 essay on web design but it’s taken on some greater meaning for me lately.
The world is text. Nearly the entire internet is text. Virtually every device you use displays text. Literally everything you read is text! Most user interface is text. A huge portion of the information available to us in the world comes to us in the form of text. You cannot do any of that without fonts.
If fonts only matter a tiny bit, they matter a tiny bit to a huge number of things that are tremendously present and significant in the life of billions of people.
I want to work on something that matters, and to me that sounds like something that matters a lot.
Substack, the platform used to publish this article, does not let us authors configure the font the articles are shown in. So YOU can have nice things, but we cannot.