Better known today for being Apple’s main font on their website, iPod and more, Myriad is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Robert Slimbach (born 1956) and Carol Twombly (born 1959) in the period 1990–92 for Adobe Systems. Myriad is a multiple masters face that works with an intelligent software “engine” to allow the user to generate variations in width and weight by accessing a broad range of stroke widths arranged on individual character rasters. (more…)

Ugly fonts, cutesy fonts, unreadable fonts, bad fonts . . . they have terrorized us for far too long, infiltrating our homes… this article presents the seven worst fonts–and the people who use them. (more…)

Apple and Microsoft have always disagreed in how to display fonts on computer displays. Today, both companies are using sub-pixel rendering to coax sharper-looking fonts out of typical low resolution screens. Where they differ is in philosophy. Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness. Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface. (more…)

It has now been 50 years since Helvetica was introduced. Even if you’ve never heard its name before, you would be bound to recognize the typeface, because you’ll have seen it so often without knowing. We live in such a bloated visual culture that a typical Western consumer is said to see - as opposed to actually notice - more than 3,000 corporate messages every day, and many of them are printed in Helvetica. (more…)