FONTS: Personal Favourites

Last week, spoke about preferred fonts for accessibility re: websites. Also, she asked this question:

Do folks have favorite fonts?

She has her own goals in mind for the answers to that question, regarding accessibility, and she's been getting useful answers from her friendlist. For myself, selfishly, I do have a list of favourites. Many - most? - of these favourites have very little to do with such concerns. There's a lot of aesthetic considerations and a lot of personal nostalgia in play with my list. There is a certain amount of privilege - the privilege of being sighted all my life thus far - in my thinking here. This is selfish. Absolutely so.

That said, I am going to go into some detail about my own list of favoured fonts. In this entry, and probably others down the line.

I start with Space: 1999. That TV series in the mid-1970's created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson was where I first started to care about typefaces, fonts, that sort of thing. Particularly the first season. Moonbase Alpha, the main backdrop of the series, doomed to wander the universe by an ill-placed nuclear waste dump turning a large chunk of our Moon into a giant fusion rocket...that place had a particular design aesthetic. Signage across the moonbase was in a font called "Countdown". Designed by Colin Brignall, I don't know how it reached the attention of Space: 1999's set designers and graphic designers.

He also designed Superstar, the font that Milton Glaser incorporated into the classic "Bullet" logo of DC Comics. So there's two.

Back to Space: 1999. The space suits were jumpsuits with the helmets, life support hardware, and so on worn over them. The life support hardware packs - front and back - were numbered. The numerals came from "Data 70". The packs labelled "1" were usually worn by Martin Landau in character as moonbase commander John Koenig when a scene would call for him to expect to do EVA work, and had that numeral inverted. Not sure why.

(There's apparently an argument over whether Data 70 is a knock-off of another font, Westminster. If you're interested, check this essay out.)

More to follow...

Font Addictions

Eric Trautman recently noted his own addiction to font collecting, and I'd be remiss to not make my own confession along these lines. For me, it started in high school with the first Letraset catalogue I'd ever laid eyes or hands upon. Back then, not so long ago by some lights, they still sold mostly dry transfer sheets. Software for home computers was a few years off. When I saw the options available in the catalogue, and started recognizing a handful or so from TV-watching...Countdown and Data 70 from Space: 1999, Stop from the original Galactica and so on...well, it's continued from there.

I get the same online newsletter, and download freebies that catch my eye from time to time. Thanks to this one company, I've even tried my hand at designing them myself, as noted a few years back in this LJ. It's another sort of fun, and one I mean to get back to as soon as the time's freed up.

I should really try out that freebie copy of Typetool I got from that magazine cover disk a couple of years back, as well. It only works when Classic mode's turned on, but that's okay for me.

Font Experimentation

I am nothing if not either prolific or a wannabe polymath.

Specifically, a font inspired by pre-1985 "Kryptonese"One of the side projects I've mentioned over at my Other Blog has been experimental font design, inspired by the comics of years gone by. as compiled by E. Nelson Bridwell, with the notes passed along to Al Turniansky by the late Rich Morrissey.

I'm about ¾ of the way to completion on the letter-glyphs, fully done on the numerals and punctuation. The letter-glyphs are one of the tough parts, numbering 118 in all. Check this site if you have any doubts. It's what I've been using as reference for this project.

The other potential headache is this: the rules of "Bridwellian" punctuation dictate that the "open parentheses" equivalent must be directly over the first character inside the parentheses. "Close parentheses" symbology is placed under the last character in the parentheses-equivalents. Underlining-equivalent has its own symbol, as a quick referral to the chart on the other end of the above link will show. Not being a professional typographic designer, I must admit to being somewhat stumped by this issue.

If you want to try out what I've got in place so far, here's the font. Right-click to save the font, and please scan the guts out of it with whatever security software you're using before you install it. Just because I've been careful doesn't mean you shouldn't as well, right?

I'll upload a chart to show what goes where and which symbols represents which sounds ASAP.