Product Description
What’s your type? Suddenly everyone’s obsessed with fonts. Whether you’re enraged by Ikea’s Verdanagate, want to know what the Beach Boys have in common with easy Jet or why it’s okay to like Comic Sans, «Just My Type» will have the answer. Learn why using upper case got a New Zealand health worker sacked. Refer to Prince in the Tafkap years as a Dingbat (that works on many levels). Spot where movies get their time periods wrong and don’t be duped by fake posters on eBay. Simon Garfield meets the people behind the typefaces and along the way learns why some fonts – like men – are from Mars and some are from Venus. From type on the high street and album covers, to the print in our homes and offices, Garfield is the font of all types of knowledge.
About the Author
Simon Garfield writes for the Observer about science, health and the arts. He is a former editor of Time Out, and his book The End of Innocence won the Somerset Maugham Prize. He has written and edited twelve books, including the bestselling Mass Observation diaries.
——————————————————————————–
Product Details
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd (October 21, 2010)
ISBN-10: 1846683017
ISBN-13: 978-1846683015
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
Just My Type is a book of stories about fonts. It examines how Helvetica and Comic Sans took over the world. It explains why we are still influenced by type choices made more than 500 years ago, and why the T in the Beatles logo is longer than the other letters. It profiles the great originators of type, from Baskerville to Zapf, as well as people like Neville Brody who threw out the rulebook. The book is about that pivotal moment when fonts left the world of Letraset and were loaded onto computers, and typefaces became something we realized we all have an opinion about. And beyond all this, the book reveals what may be the very best and worst fonts in the world – and what your choice of font says about you.