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Fonts and me…

A little snippet of information for those interested, in the late 80's, before CD-ROMs, before even the Net evolved, I was a graphic artist for a (vinyl) signwriting company and was mortified at the cost of commercial fonts. Branded fonts - like Times New Roman so common now, were anything from £40 to over £3,000 for oriental character sets.

For a number of years after that I ran the UK's only Public Domain library dedicated to distributing freeware and shareware fonts, until CorelDraw! came along with hundreds of fonts bundled. Not to the exacting quality needed by printing presses, but more than good enough for in-house design and short run fliers.

After weeding out the pirates and duplicates I now have over 17,000 fonts available on my system! Last time I checked there were over 30,000 commercial fonts available - on top of the ever growing number of freeware offerings. For the record, my favourite typefaces remain Arial/Helvetica, Times New Roman and Balloon/MS Comic Sans. The fancier ones I use sparingly and Courier (except to show coding examples) not at all.

Recently (August 2002) Microsoft put a few noses out of joint by stopping the free for all with their fonts. What was interesting was that people stepped up in MS's defence pointing out that all things considered, it's really hard to design fonts. No kidding! Here's the article.

FontSeek Search Engine

One of the best sites to visit is... CORON'S FONT PAGES

Everything from Futhark & Ogham to Klingon & Cardassian perfectly laid out. Amazing!

Ackadian Fonts

This is the first - and possibly the latest - font I created and I take my hat off to those with the time, energy, patience and diligence to create other fonts for the rest of us!



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