From retro show­card dis­play designs, to mod­ern rework­ings of clas­sic typefaces, to vir­tual clones of antique fonts, there are more typeface reviv­als avail­able to graphic design­ers today than ever before. Maybe Fred Goudy was right, “The old guys stole all our good ideas.”

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E-books are the hot new elec­tronic device. For those unfa­mil­iar with the frenzy of these new elec­tronic mar­vels, an E-book, as defined by the Oxford Dic­tion­ary, is “an elec­tronic ver­sion of a prin­ted book which can be read on a per­sonal com­puter or hand-held device designed spe­cific­ally for this pur­pose.” An E-reader is a light­weight device spe­cific­ally developed for down­load­ing and dis­play­ing these mater­i­als page by page. Amazon’s Kindle™ E-reader was the first on the mar­ket, Barnes and Noble fol­lowed with the Nook™, and there are now over thirty more in one stage or another of development.

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Hand­writ­ing fonts are hot. In our digital world of zeros and ones, on and off, black and white, hand­writ­ing fonts are a bit quirky. They evoke quickly writ­ten notes — but more delib­er­ately than a scrawl. We sell a lot of hand­writ­ing fonts on Fonts.com and we are con­sid­er­ing adding more to our offering.

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If you think about it, the craft of typo­graphy is little more than the com­bin­a­tion of three simple things: atten­tion to detail, com­mon sense and visual acu­ity. Sure, there are typo­graphic rules and guidelines, but they are, for the most part, just based on what is sens­ible and pleas­ing to the eye. Learn­ing to identify the parts of a char­ac­ter may increase a designer’s busi­ness vocab­u­lary, and know­ing the lin­eage of mod­ern Gara­mond designs may aid in the choos­ing of a good mod­ern revival of the face, but the real key to typo­graphic suc­cess is basic­ally just “sweat­ing the details” and a simple coordin­a­tion of mind and eye.

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“What’s new?” We’re asked this ques­tion daily. A friend might find out about a new love interest. A rel­at­ive could learn about a new limb on the fam­ily tree.

Want to be able to tell a fel­low designer what the hot new typeface is? It just might be possible.

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It is abund­antly clear that the cognoscenti of the type and graphic design com­munit­ies love to hate the Papyrus™ typeface. While not as reviled as the Comic Sans® typeface, Papyrus receives more than its fair share of bad press.

Sure, it’s over­used, but that doesn’t make it a bad design – just pop­u­lar. And Papyrus does tend to show up in less than stel­lar graphic design solu­tions – but, if this is the reason for sup­posedly soph­ist­ic­ated design­ers revil­ing the design, it smacks of elitism.

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What do design­ers need to know in order to work with both Latin and Arabic typo­graphy? Plenty.

For a myriad of reas­ons, the west­ern world has become aware of and, hope­fully, more sens­it­ive to the Arabic cul­ture. As a res­ult, graphic com­mu­nic­at­ors in the west­ern world are being asked to add insight into Arabic cul­ture and graphic com­mu­nic­a­tion to their cre­at­ive palette. This, how­ever, is clearly easier said than done.

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Fonts for metal and early pho­to­type­set­ting machines like the Lino­type and Mono­type had to be cre­ated within a crude sys­tem of pre­de­ter­mined char­ac­ter width val­ues. Every let­ter had to fit within, and have its spa­cing determ­ined by, a grid of only 18 units. This meant that if the ideal pro­por­tions of a par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter did not fit within a sub­set of these 18 units, it had to be altered so that it did.

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There a hun­dreds of Web sites ded­ic­ated to improv­ing typo­graphic com­mu­nic­a­tion. Some are dir­ec­ted to graphic design­ers, some to stu­dents, some to Web design­ers, but today I ran across the first (to my know­ledge) typo­graphic guide ded­ic­ated to lawyers.

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Most graphic design­ers don’t delib­er­ately steal fonts. But there are a num­ber of ways that a graphic designer can run afoul of eth­ics and the law when it comes to fonts – without even being aware of these pit­falls. One of the most pre­val­ent is pur­chas­ing fonts from a site that sells them illegally.

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