Salou #fontfacts
For the publication of the typeface Salou, I’ve created a fun series of font facts as an alternative font specimen. This was originally made for my Instagram channel, and here are all the facts in one place. There are 18 items, one for each predefined style of the variable font Salou!
Did you know the working title of Roger Excoffon’s typeface Antique Olive?Roger Excoffon worked more than 5 years on this project, collaborating and developing his sans serif statement, before it was published in 1960 under the well-known name Antique Olive.
Salou was designed as the slab-serif companion of this iconic typeface.
More about Excoffon:
https://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/mr-mistral
More about Salou:
https://viktornuebel.com/retail-fonts/salou/
Forty years ago (1985), the first successful font editing program for personal computers was released: Fontographer!
Although other programs like IKARUS or LETRAStudio existed before, Fontographer was the first widely successful Bézier-based font editor.
For me the journey into type design has started with Fontographer as well.
History of font editors:
http://designwithfontforge.com/en-US/Font_Editor_History.html
Today, custom lettering is a widespread business, but like many other art forms, it began as an exclusive work for the aristocracy.
Read more about the custom typeface Romain du Roi:
https://typofonderie.com/gazette/le-romain-du-roi-the-exclusive-typeface-of-louis-xiv
Before OpenType became the standard font format, there was a strong competition: Adobe (PostScript, Type 1) vs. Apple and Microsoft (TrueType). This was called: Font Wars!
Read a great article about the Font Wars here:
https://www.pastemagazine.com/design/adobe/the-font-wars
In the old days, a PS-Font could not hold more than 256 glyphs. Now, with the OpenType format, it is 65,536!
(The limitation is due to the fact that the TrueType maxp table stores the number of glyphs as an unsigned 16-bit integer, and the largest number representable as an unsigned 16-bit integer is 2¹⁶ — 1 = 65,535.)
The largest font I know is Arial Unicode MS with 50377 glyphs.
f you’re nerdy enough, check the current OpenType specifications:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and is a precursor to Unicode, which is how characters are coded in the digital world. Today, it mostly survives as an art form.
About ASCII-Art:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art
ASCII-Art generator:
https://www.asciiart.eu/image-to-asciiopentype/spec/changes
Pangrams are often used to briefly introduce a typeface or to show a preview of a font.
Best pangram list I know:
https://clagnut.com/blog/2380
It is a very common and widely used typographical sign nowadays: the #. It comes with an interesting story. Although the history of this sign goes back to the late 14th century, its current popularity starts with the use of keypads on the telephone. Many of the early innovations in modern telephones came from the Bell Telephone Laboratories. With the development from rotary dial telephones to push-button telephones, the rise of the # symbol began. As part of the new number pad, it found its way into our modern society. The Bell Labs was also where the name octothorp most likely came from.
The whole octothorpe story and more about other Shady Characters:
https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/05/the-octothorpe-part-1-of-2/
This story is taken from the great book Shady Characters by Keith Houston.
In 1992, Adobe introduced a new font technology: Multiple Master Fonts (MM). Multiple master fonts were created with visual axes for weight, width, and optical size. This made it possible to create countless font styles. Today, we know these as variable fonts.
Why didn’t this technology succeed at first? Wikipedia has the answer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts
It is all about the spacing! So true in many ways and especially in typography and type design. Shown here are some optional spaces that might be used for setting type or text.
Here is a good overview about the spaces and its usage:
https://type.today/en/journal/spaces
How do we call a very tiny title?? … puh, I have no idea! But, I just recently learned how the dot on i and j is also called, right: Tittle!
Founded in 1981 by Mike Parker, Matthew Carter, Cheri Cone, and Rob Freedman, Bitstream is the first digital font foundry. In 1999, Bitstream created MyFonts.com. The company, including MyFonts, was acquired by Monotype Imaging in 2012.
Bitstream created a library of “classic” fonts (usually under different names for trademark reasons) in digital form. For example, Times Ten was released as Dutch 801, Akzidenz-Grotesk as Gothic 725,… Antique Olive came out as Incised 901, and is still available today on MyFonts.
The company was heavily criticized for its strategy of offering cheap digitized versions of existing fonts that it hadn’t designed itself. This wasn’t technically illegal.
The numbers at the end of the font names are a small unsolved mystery that I have not been able to solve yet…
Since 1737, the French printer Pierre Simon Fournier spoke of the ‘point typographique’. Since then, various systems for specifying sizes have existed: e.g. the Didot point system and the American point system. Today, the international standard unit name is the (typographic) point, which measures exactly 1/72 inch, i.e., 0.0138 inch or 0.3527 mm.
More about the typographic units on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_unit
In Windows, many special typographic characters can be created by using the Alt key and a number. Of course, the typographic characters must be present in the selected font to be displayed. Alt + 0169 will show the © sign. Try Alt + 3!
Here is a list of all Alt codes:
https://www.tedmontgomery.com/tutorial/altchrc.html
I’ve created a little helper website for special characters on my own once:
https://characters.viktornuebel.com/
The #fontfacts are fun. Now that we are nearing the end of this little series of fun facts, we must also include some humor! And yes, we can do better than “I shot the serif.”
Here is a little list to smile about:
Pinterest:
https://de.pinterest.com/thatloudasianbitch/font-jokes/
Practical typography humor:
https://practicaltypography.com/typographic-humor.html
Zach Braff tells typography jokes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyATdKwj-S0&t=12s
From the community:
https://typography.guru/forums/topic/68525-typography-jokes/
Sometimes font issues aren’t just for a small circle of nerds or experts; sometimes they can be the deciding factor in court, deciding whether someone is guilty or not guilty! There have already been a handful of cases where typographic expertise has helped convict the culprits, thanks to the Font Detective!
For me, this is definitely the coolest job involving fonts.
The type expert Thomas Phinney is the Font Detective:
https://thefontdetective.com/
The term ‘font’ comes from the French word fondre (meaning ‘to melt’), as characters were made by melting a lead mix poured into matrices to produce types in batches. A font was a set of lead pieces for a specific typeface in a particular style and size.
Source & a good website explaining many typographic expressions:
https://wiki.wordsoftype.com/en/entry/font
Thank you for watching!
