Typographie, or why being bilingual rocks
Compare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua
and
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua
...
Even if you don't speak German, you'll see the difference. This is, of course, pure luck, but _aren't_ I lucky that a typographer with too much time on his hands went and edited the German edition of Wikipedia?
I could have learnt all of this elsewhere, of course. There are, presumably, books on typography that I could have (should have?) hunted down, given my interest in fonts.
But here is, in a nutshell, a whole bunch of interesting facts and categorisations. Germans - like the Swiss, only a little less so - are famous for their sense of order. The normative DIN system has - thanks to the regulations of paper sizes (most people will be familiar with DIN A4), made its way into the world, but there are thousands of them.
16518 is the one that I found interesting right now - it classifies typefaces.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_16518
Gods, will I ever be looking around wikipedia.
Until now, I've not been a great fan - I will look up things if I need a quick overview, but mostly, I've not found that the articles had enough depth to be satisfactory.
These do.
Sorry for feeding the font addiction of any of my readers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua
and
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua
...
Even if you don't speak German, you'll see the difference. This is, of course, pure luck, but _aren't_ I lucky that a typographer with too much time on his hands went and edited the German edition of Wikipedia?
I could have learnt all of this elsewhere, of course. There are, presumably, books on typography that I could have (should have?) hunted down, given my interest in fonts.
But here is, in a nutshell, a whole bunch of interesting facts and categorisations. Germans - like the Swiss, only a little less so - are famous for their sense of order. The normative DIN system has - thanks to the regulations of paper sizes (most people will be familiar with DIN A4), made its way into the world, but there are thousands of them.
16518 is the one that I found interesting right now - it classifies typefaces.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_16518
Gods, will I ever be looking around wikipedia.
Until now, I've not been a great fan - I will look up things if I need a quick overview, but mostly, I've not found that the articles had enough depth to be satisfactory.
These do.
Sorry for feeding the font addiction of any of my readers.