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2012 Headline (Olympics font) 310–12, 310
* Both Trebuchet and Comic Sans are highly regarded by those who work with dyslexic children – their easy, unthreatening clarity proving far more accessible than harsher and more traditional fonts.
* The ultimate Cooper Black font, the connoisseur’s choice, is ATF Cooper Hilite, a wet-look 3-D type, created by adding an internal white line. This is the equivalent of go-faster stripes on the side of a car, giving each letter the pumped-up steroid appearance of an inner tube fit to burst.
* Manutius and Griffo later fell out, and there were squabbles over who was responsible for the first italic types. It is widely believed that the inspiration stemmed from the hand of Niccolo Niccoli, a contemporary Venetian who used a slanted style when he wished to write faster or express dynamism. However, punchcutters in Florence also subsequently placed a claim.
* This was Mike Parker, the man who should be credited with the great expansion of Helvetica in the United States. Parker joined Mergenthaler Linotype in 1959 as design director and immediately began looking for a new adaptable European font that would work at many weights. He oversaw amendments to the Swiss designs to suit the hot metal process, and realized he had hit a goldmine.
* One of the few examples of successful typeface protection came in 1998, when Adobe won its case against Southern Software Inc and others. Adobe argued that not only had its fonts been copied, but the Utopia software that created them had been copied too, leading to a new law prohibiting this.
* The other side of the Linotype advertisement contained smaller notices for Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Cuticura Skin Cure and Musgrave’s Ulster Stoves (‘as supplied to Prince Bismarck’) in fonts that were wild and loose, each using a variety of faces, shouting at the reader like fairground barkers. From German blackletter to English grotesque to Parisian antique, the fonts were seldom suitable for the dubious products, the compositors seemingly choosing type at random in the dark. This disharmony wasn’t resolved in the advertising world until the late 1920s, when marketing people slowly awoke to the early possibilities of branding and saw how type could say much beyond mere words. This process was abetted by the Monotype Super Caster, which made new large-size display letters cheaply, thus diminishing the practice of relying on old irregular fonts from an unsorted box.
* The Monotype name nonetheless continues to be a dominant force in type design, though its focus has changed immeasurably since opening a Silicon Valley office in Palo Alto in 1991. There, Monotype licensed its fonts to Microsoft, Apple and Adobe, adapted for digital software formats. Its headquarters is now in Massachusetts, but it continues to run its UK operations from Salfords. It has incorporated both Linotype and the International Typeface Corporation (ITC), and in March 2010 it announced its Creative Companion Library, a cut-price deal for those wanting to start a new digital font library. This was a huge collection of fonts, all available in the latest OpenType format for all computer platforms: 2,433 typefaces in all, including Frutiger, Palatino and ITC Conduit. There was no Helvetica or many other desirables, but it was still quite a bargain at $4,999 for up to ten workstations using one printer. Professional fonts, once hand-drawn by scribes, then hand-cut and hand-tooled and toiled over for months, were now about $2 each.
* There are also several professionally made fonts with music-associated names that have no trademarked link with a band or its music: Achtung Baby, designed by John Roshell and Richard Starkins, in 1999; Acid Queen (Jackson Tan Tzun Tat, 1996); Tiger Rag (John Viner, 1989); Get Back (Pietervan Rosmalen, 1999).
* Some of Parkinson’s early work is packaged in the fonts selection provided with Hallmark Card Studio 2010 Deluxe, a software package that enables you to make cards at home. There are 10,000+ card designs, 7,500 sentiments, and a surprisingly wide-ranging selection of typefaces, slanted towards script fonts with ill-fitting names (CarmineTango, Caslon AntT, Starbabe HMK).
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