Just My Type

You could be forgiven for thinking fonts aren't all that exciting. After all, they're just variations in the shape and style of letters, and most of those we come across every day are incredibly vanilla. However type affects many aspects of our lives, and this book that tells the story of fonts and the people who created them is surprisingly fascinating.

There's a good reason fonts seem dull: the best of them are deliberately subtle to the point of being invisible, as the author explains in chapter 3. "The more a reader becomes aware of a typeface or a layout on a page, the worse that typography is." It's more important to pay attention to the message a piece of writing is trying to put across than to be distracted by the way it's presented.

By contrast the people behind the fonts are a much more colourful bunch. The book goes into the lurid life of Eric Gill, an obscene pervert who was behind the popular Gill Sans font. Then there was Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, the eccentric owner of the ill-fated Doves typeface. The book brings alive characters who were sometimes obsessive, and often very dedicated to their craft. In the digital age there's less money involved in font design, and the book goes on to explain the challenges of piracy and competition font designers face in the digital age.

The book also covers the history of type, from the time of Gutenberg and Caxton onwards, when making a font meant creating lots of cumbersome metal blocks. It's an unexpectedly political story in places, with certain typefaces associated with particular cultural outlooks. Thanks to corporate branding and the places we tend to see them regularly, fonts affect us on an emotional level, even subconsciously. The right ones are also essential for road safety, and we have people like Margaret Calvert to thank for their careful work on traffic lettering intended to be easy to read at speed.

Just My Type opens with a look at Comic Sans, the font so many of us love to hate, and it examines why it evokes such a strong reaction. Towards the end of the book there's a run-down of some of the worst offences to good taste and legibility, according to the author. It's a highly personal list, but it is entertaining and it emphasises the way fonts have crept into our lives to the extent that most people have definite reactions to them, whilst years ago such opinions were the preserve of professional designers.

This is an engaging book, partly because of Simon Garfield's easy style of writing and partly because he's researched far and wide to extract the juiciest pieces of trivia from this apparently dry subject matter. It's a bit of a miscellany, covering aspects as diverse as politics, history, design, biography and font-based toys. It's more the kind of book that you would read to be entertained and informed, rather than a reference book to dip into for specific information. However it would be very useful for anyone interested in fonts as they relate to graphic design, and keen to understand what makes the difference between a successful font and one that fails to do its job.



Review © Ros Jackson