It all began with
Near Letter Quality Sans Serif, which was the best looking (out of 4) font on my
Panasonic 9-pin
dot matrix printer. It took 20 minutes to print one fan fold sheet, and made the paper curl from the impact of those tiny hot pins, but it was
almost letter quality; it bravely tried to cast off the stalwart and utilitarian mantle of dot-matrixhood. In high school I met
Chicago, that intrepid muscular sentry of the
Macintosh interface. Though the Mac has moved on to greener and considerably more
anti-aliased pastures, Chicago stood stoutly on the menubar for over 15 years. It was there on the Mac that I learned the Cardinal Numbers of Fontology:
9, 12, 14, 18, 24, 36. As the years passed, I dug into the true power of Mac graphics and learned about the
lust and rage that is
PostScript. As I played with (what was then
Aldus, does anybody remember Aldus?)
FreeHand and a syphilitic Apple
LaserWriter Plus I saw the wonder of
vectors. And what love I then found for
Avant Garde with its clean lines and perfect smooth circles.
But time passed, I grew, and matured, and
went to college. Three women lived across the hall from me, one with a Mac+ that had problems. I, of course,
sorted them all out and in return got all of her PostScript fonts. Chief among them was
Belwe. Though not as well known as those that have come before, it was strong, yet ornamented with enough flair to make it interesting. After I graduated I became obsessed with
Futura especially
extra bold. It showed up in many of my web designs. Now my adulation falls to
Verdana, the boon of any coder who must stare at unadorned text all the live long day. It is clean with no cruddy
serifs wasting valuable pixels when I'm trying to fit as much text on screen as possible.
So ends my History To This Point, more typefaces will be added as the vicissitudes of life lead me through type-infested waters.