How we fell in love with our fonts

[Ek Kanya]

True to type: how we fell in love with our letters

From easyJet to Facebook, road signs to clothing labels, we are surrounded by a world of type. But what messages do its different kinds convey? In this extract from his new book, Just My Type, Simon Garfield looks at the history of typefaces, the obsessive care taken over their design ~ and the role they play in shaping our lives


On 25 September 2007, a woman named Vicki Walker committed a type crime so calamitous that it cost her not only her job, but almost her sanity. Walker was working as an accountant in a New Zealand health agency, and there was an email to send. Regrettably, she ignored the only rule that everyone who has ever emailed knows: CAPITAL LETTERS LOOK LIKE YOU HATE SOMEONE AND ARE SHOUTING.

It was a Tuesday afternoon. Walker pressed "Send" on this instruction: TO ENSURE YOUR STAFF CLAIM IS PROCESSED AND PAID, PLEASE DO FOLLOW THE BELOW CHECKLIST.

Not the written word's finest hour in lots of ways, but hardly a sackable offence. The letters were in blue, and elsewhere her email contained bold black and red. She worked for ProCare in Auckland, a company which clearly placed great pride in knowing when and when not to hold down the Caps button, though it did not have an email etiquette guide at the time Vicki Walker splurged on upper case.

Upper and lower case? The term comes from the position of the loose metal or wooden letters laid in front of the traditional compositor's hands before they were used to form a word – the commonly used ones on an accessible lower level, the capitals above them, waiting their turn. Even with this distinction, the compositor would still have to "mind their ps and qs", so alike were they when each letter was dismantled from a block of type and then tossed back into the compartments of a tray.

The correct use of type varies over time. These days, corporate edicts are common, and memos come down from on high like tablets of stone: thou shalt use only on both internal and external communications. But who is to say that lower-case Arial from 1982 is preferable to the way we communicated in TRAJAN CAPITALS on the pediments of public buildings in ancient Rome? And how did our eyes switch from accepting one over the other, to the point where a thoughtless choice of capitals-all-the-way became a cause of headaches and dismissals?

Walker was sacked three months after her email was deemed to have caused "disharmony in the workplace", which would have been laughable had it not caused her so much distress. Twenty months later, after remortgaging her house and borrowing money from her sister to fight her case, Walker appealed successfully for unfair dismissal, and was awarded $17,000 (£10,000).


Read the full article here

[amey katkar]

letters and fonts play very important part in our life...if we rewind our day we can c the different types of fonts we are exposed , while travelling , reading , on internet ,etc inshort everywhere we see diff fonts...!!!

[raja ghose]

Uppercase is a modern etiquette thing. The ancient greeks and Romans have always been using uppercase.

Also some things like 'reverse type is more difficult to read' is such a load of bull! We learn to read and write on a blackboard which is written in reverse. White chalk on black board.

[star]

beautiful! I didnt know this:

Upper and lower case? The term comes from the position of the loose metal or wooden letters laid in front of the traditional compositor's hands before they were used to form a word – the commonly used ones on an accessible lower level, the capitals above them, waiting their turn.

Beautiful and very well written article!

[shrutigoyal]

Wonderful article..i didn't realize it before reading this article that the font settings on our blog, mails, articles can have a huge effect on how many people read our content. ...

[DesignBoyz]

the history of type is so beautiful that I want to start working on letterpress once again. the feeling of stamped typography on paper is oh-so-gooood!