Weekend Diversion: Fonts of knowledge

Last week I was too busy with work to put together a Weekend Diversion post. So this week I thought it would be appropriate to share things from my work world: This is all about fonts.

The video above from Vox tells us “Why the Wingdings font exists”. It’s always interesting to learn the origins of a font, and that font is often looked down on. However, I’ve often found it useful to adapt for graphics, including some I’ve used on this blog (Sh! That’s our secret!).

However, the video above was originally for a post I began on March 14, 2016, though it was just the links. I have no idea why I never finished it, or even what I intended to say about it. Better late than never, right? Actually, this is a bit like last month’s “Internet wading: Lost and found”, where I also shared things I’d somehow missed sharing.

A few months after the video above, Vox published a video “Where the ‘comic book font’ came from”:


I bet Roger Green has already seen this video, but I didn’t until I checked out the Wingdings video, and it was listed on YouTube at the right side of my screen. I found this interesting all in itself because I’m always interested in the evolution of publishing and of fonts.

But another thing I found interesting about it is how the font we know today originated as hand-written (by “letterers”), something I knew, as well as that the modern computer fonts are intended to mimic handwritten lettering. When I was much younger, I used to hand letter stuff all the time, often coming up with hard to read decorative lettering that I never actually used for anything other than my own amusement. Years later, I occasionally used hand lettering to make greeting cards for people, but only for fun. I have no formal training in lettering, or art, for that matter, and I never made any attempt to get “good” at hand lettering. But I really admire people who did and have.

Finally—since I always share at least three videos—a video I ran across recently. It’s from a series of videos called “Beginning Graphic Design” and is on typography. It discusses all the basic concepts I used on every project, and may even hint at why I like typography so much:


That’s it for this tiptoe through typography, but it’s not the first time I’ve talked about type. In fact, it was in a Weekend Diversion post back in 2014: “Weekend Diversion: The History of Typography”. That post talks even more about the background to the topic of typography and fonts.

Maybe I’ll make a Weekend Diversion post in advance for the next time I’m busy with work. Here’s another secret: I’ve done that in the past. That’s kind of remarkable, really, because I’m not really the—ahem!—type who manages to do that most of the time.