One of my best galpals, giftdonkey and I, spent the other day geeking out over fonts together, as I have been not unknown to do (I used to spend hours as a child creating my own coded font systems based on random shapes). She’s the one who turned me on to the fascinating doc Helvetica and extended my crush from one Frere-Jones (Sasha, the New Yorker writer and he of the Ecclesiology of Putting the Black Back in Rock) to include his womb-mate (Tobias, the creator of many lovely fonts).
Am I the only one ridiculously obsessed with these two brothers? Why can’t I find enough jpgs of these dorkily handsome, dorkily literate, crazily dorky boys? What kind of egg and sperm produce two such wonderboys, and what are their vegetarian pseudosocialist black-turtlenecked horn-rimmed Thanksgiving conversations like? I might have to go on a pilgrimage to their homes of artistic yuppiedom in Fort Greene and Brooklyn Heights, where I will only imagine the kinds of Black Power and Ginsberg recordings their parents spun for them before tucking them into organic Shaker quilts and pillows spun from the lapaca fur of poor third world families (unless I can invite myself in). The only other family I’d rather hang out with are the Gyllenhaals, and the family lowest on my wish list of materfamilial stalking are the Ronsons (deduce your own reasons, they’re probably all right).
Oy gevalt. Back to the fonts. But wait - I had a segue, a flawless transition. The idea of families leads me to the great family trees of fonts. Like this lovely one:
How pretty is she? Take her and her typewriter friend fonts for a spin here. So, to continue my by now lame duck segue, family trees of fonts are just as interesting as the dysfunctional families we all come from. That’s because they evolve from one another but sometimes are as different as far steps on the ladder of chaos theory. Other times, they look just like the apple fell from the tree. I for one am opposed to the white padded wall hall that mod design has been careening down for years now, with white mod furniture, clean lines and YAWN… boredom!!!!!!!! For websites, yes, I think a certain lack of clutter for readability, but in fonts I desire a wild creativity that will let me see letters as pieces of art, as broken down vehicles with expressions of their own, as splatter paint of Pollock rather than careful conceptual lines of LeWitt. But then, I desire mischief or strangeness or codes in fonts, as in WingDings, even though it was put together by Microsoft. MacGyver of Fonts, where are you?
So who invented movable type? During a dinner party involving biodynamic red wine-fueled Trivial Pursuit (full competitive geek disclosure: I LOVE winning Trivial Pursuit, and consider it my training for Geriatric Jeopardy), a question threw in nonchalantly that the Chinese invented printing. I had always thought it was Koreans, perhaps due to some Wikipedia misinformation. Turns out the Chinese invented ceramic-based movable type and printing, and the Koreans invented metal type printing. My Trivial Pursuit companion resolved any conflict by informing me that Koreans (my ethnicity) are the same as Chinese (his ethnicity) - or just descended from Mongolians, and thusly basically the same. I gave him the evil eye, he laughed and we turned back to chomping on our Moroccan briouat and Italian risotto and guzzling our Spanish wine and playing our Chinese factory-made board game.