I hate typography.
Well maybe not hate. I don't feel deeply enough about it to hate it. But I don't really see it, like posh people don't see their servants. It's just there, doing its job.
However, I accept that I have to develop a working knowledge of typography. So I've read lots of books on the subject. Or tried to at least. Definately looked at them for long enough. And I've learned some stuff about the mechanics of it, mostly from this book, which was recommended by Peter Holden at his lecture.
But on actual fonts, I was totally in the dark. How on earth do I decide what is 'good', and what is 'bad'? How, even, do I tell them apart? If only I could recognise them in their natural environment rather than just on an indesign document, and build up a collection of mental images that correlate with the name on the font list. After all, you can't recognise birds just from pictures in a bird book, you have to equate those images to the real thing.
Then I read this.
It's deliberately styled like a bird identification book, even down to the binoculars on the cover.
Inside there are articles on 125 frequently encountered fonts, containing brief histories of the fonts and their creators, identifying features, and pictures of the fonts in the wild.
In some cases there are comparison charts explaining the difference between similar or rival fonts, like this one for Arial vs. Helvetica.
It was news to me that Arial was, supposedly, adopted by Microsoft as an 'alternative to Helvetica' because they didn't want to pay the licence fee to Lynotype. This, apparently, really annoys typographers, who all seem to idolise Helvetica for reasons that are lost to me. I rather like Arial, even more now I know it's not the done thing to like it.
But I still can't explain, typographically, why I like it.
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