999 Fonts in 60 Seconds
In Just My Type: A Book About Fonts, author Simon Garfield takes readers on a tour through all things typographic. The book, which received a rave this week from The New York Times, traces the development of typography through historic figures like Johannes Gutenberg, John Baskerville, Eric Gill and Jan Tschichold, while considering topics like legibility versus readability, the importance of typeface choice in political campaigns, the advent of digital type and corresponding explosion of new fonts, and what your favorite font says about you. (In the book, Garfield takes Pentagram’s own “What Type Are You?” test. He is Archer Hairline.)
Pentagram’s Naresh Ramchandani and Michael Bierut collaborated on the book’s trailer, a montage that sends the “Just My Type” title pulsing through 999 different fonts (more or less) in a minute. The trip starts and ends in Archer, the font used on the book’s US cover (designed by Roberto de Vicq de Clumptich), passing through much-loved fonts like Bodoni, Helvetica and Gotham, as well as ne’er-do-wells like Comic Sans, Papyrus and Arial. How many fonts can you spot?
Just My Type is out September 1 from Gotham Books. The book was originally published to acclaim in the UK last fall.
Project Team: Naresh Ramchandani, partner-in-charge and creative director; Michael Bierut, partner and designer; Katie Barcelona and Niko Skourtis, font compilers. Animation by Steven Qua.