Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft’s influence in the world. Arial’s ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It’s actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor. Full Story

Typography is a discipline that goes back many centuries. With the revolution of desktop publishing came a level of typography that was only known to a select few. Today, the use of type by graphic and web designers has developed into an art in itself. Now sophisticated software enables anyone to be a type expert!

Communication Through Typography

In verbal communication there is a transfer of information between speaker and listener. So that your message is understood, you choose words that are pertinent to the conversation and you speak in a tone of voice in order to communicate an idea. To communicate in print is a bit more challenging. However, the basic goal is to get the message across as successfully as possible.

In print, the appearance of text enhances the message the author is trying to convey. By changing the appearance of the words, you can make a connection with the reader. Without typography the words would be left to the unvarying typewriter-style font. (more…)

Fixedsys is actually the oldest font in Windows. The name means fixed system, although it is often pronounced “fixed size” because its glyphs are monospace or fixed-width. It was the system font in Windows 1.0 and 2.0. For Windows 3.x, the system font was changed to MS Sans Serif. (more…)

A bitmap font is one that stores each glyph as an array of pixels (that is, a bitmap). It is less commonly known as a raster font. Bitmap fonts look best at their native pixel size. At non-native sizes, many text rendering systems perform nearest-neighbor resampling, introducing ugly jagged edges. More advanced systems perform anti-aliasing on bitmap fonts whose size does not match the size that the application requests. This technique works well for making the font smaller but not as well for increasing the size, as it tends to blur the edges. (more…)

One of the most popular font categories on this website is Graffiti Fonts, but what exactly is a graffiti? The word Graffiti is actually the plural of Graffito which means a drawing or inscription made on a wall or other surface, usually meant to be seen by the public. (more…)