Type Gets Al's Stamp of Approval

There are millions of fonts in typography - some have a long standing tradition such as Times Roman, others are right to the minute.

Some are favoured for easy of readability in smaller typefaces (such as Times), others are more iconographic.

While most people have a choice of a dozen or so font sets with their word processing program, graphic artists can select from one from many thousands but the right choice for the job is just as important as selecting the right tool.

For instance:

l?...or ...I?

The first letter is actually a lowercase 'l' and the second is the capital I which always amuses us when we see Illinois written using Arial.

But in more serious applications - like Al Gore's sequel to his mega best seller An Inconvenient Truth - assuming context alone is not enough.

So Big Al gets one of his staffers to phone up the font foundary (that's what they're called - a throw back to the old days where typefaces were cast in lead for the movable type printers) and asks them to change the figure 1 so it looks less like an uppercase I.

Oh yes, the book is about to go to press so could they change this font in five hours please?

Not as easy as it sounds.

Changes to a well-established font family can change proportions, possibly resulting in the entire book needing to be retypeset, not to mention requiring every artist having the font Brioni to download a new character set to ensure the uniformity of text.

Find out more about this interesting story here.