Fonts 

I like fonts. In fact, for a time, I considered myself to be a fontaholic until I found out the lengths such people go to feed their desire for font-freshness and fontacy: I’m just a dilettante!

You really can’t be involved with the creation of websites without paying some attention to the fonts you use; their suitability for the site and their legibility to the reader. You should know that what is a legible print font won’t be so good as a screen font and vice versa.

I use Gill Sans MT or Century Gothic for paper and the fonts listed in the various ‘Help’ notes on any of our sites for screen displays: Verdana as the main, sans-serif, font and Georgia for serif. There isn't a problem if you don’t have Verdana, as the default sans-serif fonts supplied with most PCs are just as good. However, I do feel that Georgia is superior to Times New Roman which is the usual default serif font, particularly for the display of plant names of which we do a lot, so this font is embedded in the Redhall site.

The other embedded font on the site is timeburner which is used on the Index page and in the Marmite section.

I used to make up my own fonts. Not using Fontographer @ $399 but Erwin Denissen’s Font Creator, currently at $79 for v11 but much cheaper when I first bought v3.

I did the usual: a font based on my handwriting, ( ), a big fat font, ( ) and a font derived from that used on the cover of the “Dune” paperbacks, ( ). Then I realised just how difficult it is to create a useful font: each letter need its own space, very few letters are absolutely symmetrical, how important kerning is and that you have to look at each letter and combinations of letters in large type to know if you’ve got it right.

Blocker is mostly wrong and the PA kerning on Dune is wrong!

There are fonts to love and fonts to hate and perhaps the most hated is Comic Sans. I’m not sure why? I don’t particularly like it and would agree that it’s used for unsuitable purposes but I don’t understand why it arouses what, in many, is genuine rage. In its defence, it must be said that it was created for the specific purpose of being used in speech-bubble lettering in a cartoon and was never meant to be a general text font.

Oh, and all of you quick brown fox fans .. have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00E_LVo_aTo

An excellent book on fonts and the history of type is “JUST MY TYPE” by Simon Garfield, (ISBN 978-1846683015).