Know This Headline's Font? You're 'Just My Type'

A limitation to posting here is that we can't change the font (shrink or enlarge text, bold, italicize, capitalize, underline, and change color work pretty effectively though!), but the type of font you use in other documents can silently say a lot about who you are and the message you are trying to convey. Get creative and change it up sometime - then go back and ask yourself if the change is toward more formal, flirty, seasonal, silly, manly/girly, etc - have fun playing!

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/04/140126278 ... c=fb&cc=fp
Know This Headline's Font? You're 'Just My Type'
September 4, 2011


Ready For (Font) Change: Gotham, the typeface used by Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, is giving Helvetica a run for its money as the go-to typeface for declarative signs.

Are you an Arial person? A Times New Roman? A Garamond? A Lucida Handwriting? So much of our communication is expressed in text these days that people become deeply attached to the typeface they use to type out their thoughts. Bold or unbold, serif or sans-serif — like the car you drive or the clothes you wear, your font expresses who you are ... and can go in and out of style. "Type, like fashion and music, comes in and out of vogue," Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type, tells NPR's Audie Cornish.

Fonts didn't always hold such a significant spot in the cultural imagination. Before personal computers, type looked largely the same. "It was a liberating thing in the '80s" when it became possible to manipulate fonts with the click of a mouse. But with great power comes great responsibility ... and some didn't use their typeface forces for good. To wit: Comic Sans. The playful letters became so overused that it inspired a backlash. "The key thing with Comic Sans and with all fonts is really the use to which it's put," he says. "If you used it ... to invite people to your school fair, that was great. [It was] not so great, however, when it began appearing on the sides of ambulances and gravestones."

Then there's Helvetica — a typeface used so widely that for many people it has become essentially invisible. But fonts come and go, and Garfield says that Helvetica has a rival these days: Gotham. (You may recognize Gotham from Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign materials.) But while fonts today simply fall out of fashion, back before computers, getting rid of a font wasn't simply a matter of waiting for it to fade away.