Okay, I admit it… I have neglected my fonts. I’d like to blame it on the fact that I am a web designer, and web friendly fonts and extremely limited but that is a poor excuse. Good web designers would slap my hand for even thinking of such a blasphemous thing. This may be a knee jerk, ‘duh’ comment, but I pledged to myself I was going to write my blogs as I think them, so here I am.

From here on out I will dedicate a small portion of my day to really study and get to know my fonts. Even if it is something as simple as typing in a custom phrase in Font Book, rotating through each font, and writing down my favorites and their possible uses. I need to break out of my Helvetica and Univers cycle.

Perhaps one of the most enlightening discussions we’ve had at Imulus was in regard to the following question.

Starting now if you had to read all type for the rest of your life in one typeface, what would it be?^*

My answer: Gotham. The font is profound, clean, inescapably strong, yet different enough in weight to convey emphasis and prowess. Gotham is the sort of typeface that a type-designer becomes famous for. It’s Helvetica with out the genericism^**.

So while Gotham is used frequently (pdf) it deserves credit for being a landmark typeface in the twenty first century^***.

In the end a typeface is much like wine, if it tastes good to you the complexities and price don’t mean much. However, you may just find that over time your tastes refine. And as far as Gotham is concerned, it’s about as refined as it gets.

^{* Note: This means an entire font family, not one particular weight.
** I’m a wannabe lexicographer.
*** Gotham was released from H&J in the year 2000.}