FONTS: Personal Favourites
Sep. 21st, 2020 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dewlineLast week, kestrell 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...
kestrell 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...
.svg){kind=link}
no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 07:59 pm (UTC)Still have a liking for Optima, and Calibri.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 09:08 pm (UTC)Calibri...off-limits to me, I think.
Optima, I have, but no real attachment to it.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 09:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 11:09 pm (UTC)https://typeballs.com/
Of course, someone is going to gravitate to this. And, of course, someone in the maker community is trying to make new ones.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4126040
And fonts to recreate the look.
http://selectric.org/selectric/
http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-44934.html
no subject
Date: 2020-09-22 12:19 am (UTC)The Selectric was a great machine back in the day. I first used them in 1977, and it was quite a step back when I had to use an ancient manual typewriter from 1979 to 1981. Then it was back to Sslectrics for several years before I had regular computer access.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-22 02:48 pm (UTC)https://www.myfonts.com/search/Selectric/