Archive for Typography

Amaranath sasesusos

Today I learned that people whose job was to align the type bars in typewriters (during manufacture) used this quasi-sentence to test the alignment: Amaranath sasesusos Oronoco initiation secedes Uruguay Philadelphia An explanation, from Darren Wershler-Henry’s 2005 book The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting: “Amaranath,” the misspelled name of an imaginary flower, checks […]

A font to avoid in body text: Weiss

Many years ago, I read and enjoyed Richard S. Grant’s 1987 novel Rumors of Spring. But it had one flaw that lessened my enjoyment: the typeface that it was printed in. (At least in the mass-market paperback edition; I don’t know about other editions.) The letters of the typeface were fairly attractive. But the punctuation […]

Some font identification tools

I’ve linked in the past to Indentifont, which asks you a series of questions about a font to help identify it. But I only just found out that there are several services that can identify a font based on an image of characters from the font. In particular: WhatTheFont, from MyFonts. Finds matches among their […]

Tolkien fonts

Some Tolkien-related fonts: Tolkienesque Regular and Tolkienesque New (scroll down on page) Two fonts inspired by Tolkien’s calligraphy. The Regular version “has a slightly distressed feel, with uneven edges”; the New version “remade the entire font from scratch, in order to clean up all the outlines (to remove the ‘distressed’ quality) and give it a […]

Science-fiction-movie typography

Here’s a detailed look at the typography in the movie Alien. (Published in 2014.) (I posted this link on Facebook in 2015, but am recycling some of my old links from elsewhere to have them all in one place.) That same blog, Typeset in the Future, also has writeups of typography in 2001, Moon, and […]

Typography map of Europe

Fascinating article (from 2012) about a German map that showed “the distribution of typefaces across Europe in 1901.” Article goes on to discuss the political significance of the Fraktur style of typefaces, and the ways that the Nazis first embraced and then rejected that style.