50 Fun Facts About Typography

Which typeface, drawn by Chris Costello in 1982, did a Saturday Night Live sketch mock for its use in Avatar?

Papyrus earned Costello just $750 when he sold the rights, although it has shipped on almost every personal computer since 1997. Ryan Gosling starred in the 2017 sketch.

Which casual typeface did Microsoft's Vincent Connare model on the lettering of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns?

Comic Sans was drawn for the speech bubbles of the cartoon guides in Microsoft Bob, but it was finished too late to be included. CERN physicists later used it to present the Higgs boson results.

Which Reed College course, audited by Steve Jobs after he left his degree, did he credit for the Mac's many typefaces?

Calligraphy at Reed was taught by Robert Palladino. Jobs later said that without that single course the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

In the typographic term 'sans-serif', the word 'sans' is borrowed from which language, where it means 'without'?

French supplies the 'sans', while 'serif' is of uncertain origin and may come from the Dutch word schreef, meaning a line or pen-stroke.

Which Swiss typeface, first sold as Neue Haas Grotesk, was later renamed using the Latin word for 'Swiss'?

Helvetica beat the first suggestion, Helvetia, which a sewing machine maker and an insurance company were already using. A 2007 documentary film marked its fiftieth anniversary.

Which word for a worn-out phrase began as printers' jargon for a metal plate that reproduced the same page endlessly?

Cliché comes from a verb meaning 'to click', supposedly echoing the sound of a mould striking metal. Its sense of a trite expression is first recorded in 1888.

Which pair of terms comes from the two trays in which printers kept their metal letters?

Uppercase and lowercase began as furniture: metal type was sorted into shallow wooden drawers called type cases, and the capitals lived in the higher one.

Which word, paired with 'jot' in the King James Bible, names the small dot above the letters i and j?

Tittle appears in the Gospel verse promising that not 'one jot or one tittle' of the law will pass away. That line is why 'jot and tittle' now means every last detail.

Which symbol, found on every keyboard, began as ancient scribes' joined-up way of writing the Latin word 'et'?

Ampersand is a corruption of 'and per se and', the phrase once used when naming the symbol by itself. In some typefaces the letters e and t can still be made out.

Font menus preview typefaces with 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' because it is which kind of sentence?

A pangram uses every letter of the alphabet at least once, so a single line shows off a whole typeface. Mark Dunn's novel Ella Minnow Pea builds its plot around this very sentence.

Which spacing adjustment, named after overhanging bits of metal type, fine-tunes the gap between letter pairs like AV?

Kerning was so laborious in metal type that printers saved it for the combinations that needed it most. Digital fonts made it far easier to adjust many more.

Which term for the space between lines of text comes from the metal strips typesetters slid between rows of type?

Leading is pronounced 'ledding' because those strips were made of lead. Word processors usually call the same setting line spacing.

In letters such as g, p and y, which name is given to the stroke that hangs below the baseline?

Descender strokes defeated some early computer displays, which had no room beneath the line and simply shifted letters like g and y upwards.

Which dimension of a typeface, named after a single letter, shows how tall small letters like a, e and o stand?

X-height runs from the baseline to the mean line, the level where most small letters stop. Sans-serif faces built for big display text, such as Impact, often have especially tall ones.

Which term names the space inside letters such as o and c, whose opening to the outside is called an aperture?

Counter spaces can be closed, as in o, or open, as in c. A double-storey g, the kind with a loop for a tail, has two closed ones.

Which term describes two or more letters fused into a single printed character, as f and i often are in books?

Ligature forms such as fi exist because the hood of the f collides with the dot of the i in many typefaces, so the pair is combined into one glyph.

Which property of a typeface do the labels thin, light, regular, semibold and black describe?

Weight is how thick or thin a typeface's strokes are. Web pages record it as a number, with 400 standing for normal text and 700 for bold.

Which kind of typeface, standard on typewriters and in code editors, gives a narrow i the same width as a wide m?

Monospaced type keeps every character in a tidy column, which makes source code easier to read because similar-looking symbols are harder to confuse.

Which slanted style of type did Venetian printer Aldus Manutius introduce to print small, easily carried books?

Italic type is named after Italy, where it was first designed. Manutius had his cut by Francesco Griffo, who later fell out with him and claimed to have conceived it.

Which term for evenly adjusting the space between all letters in a block of text is written in CSS as letter-spacing?

Tracking could only go one way in the days of metal type: letters could be set further apart, never closer. Digital type can tighten them as well.

Which class of serif typeface, born in the late 1700s, pairs hairline serifs with stark thick-and-thin contrast?

Didone fuses the surnames of the typefounders Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni, who defined the look. In its heyday the style was simply called modern.

Sans-serif typefaces like Gill Sans and Frutiger, shaped by handwriting and classical capitals, belong to which class?

Humanist designs take their inspiration from traditional letterforms, such as the square capitals of ancient inscriptions and older serif typefaces, rather than from pure geometry.

Slab serif typefaces were sold in the 1800s under which nickname, despite having no link to the place it names?

Egyptian was pure fashion: Napoleon's campaign had left the public fascinated with the country, and type founders borrowed the name. The first types so called were actually sans-serifs.

Which family of dense, angular typefaces, the style of Gutenberg's Bible, survives in many newspaper nameplates?

Blackletter is popularly known as Gothic. Newspapers keep it in their nameplates because it evokes the origins of the printing press and lends the title gravitas.

Which serif typeface did adviser Stanley Morison create with Victor Lardent for a British daily newspaper in 1931?

Times New Roman replaced a spindly nineteenth-century face after Morison urged the paper to adopt a more robust design. He based it on an older type named Plantin.

Which geometric typeface by Paul Renner, a favourite of Stanley Kubrick, fills the titles of Wes Anderson's early films?

Futura is built from near-perfect circles, triangles and squares. Renner shared the Bauhaus taste for modern forms, although he was never associated with the school.

Which typeface, inspired by old New York building signs, became the lettering of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign posters?

Gotham began as a commission from GQ magazine. Designer Tobias Frere-Jones walked Manhattan with a camera and drew on signs such as the one on the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

Which typeface, designed by Howard Kettler for IBM in the 1950s, is the industry standard for writing screenplays?

Courier got its name because Kettler felt a letter could be 'the courier, which radiates dignity, prestige, and stability'. IBM never trademarked it, so the name is free for anyone to use.

Carol Twombly's Adobe typeface, a staple of film posters, copies capitals carved on which emperor's column in Rome?

Trajan was drawn from a full-size rubbing of the inscription at the column's base. It appears on so many film posters that satirical videos have dubbed it 'the movie font'.

Which statesman of ancient Rome wrote the essay that was scrambled to make the 'lorem ipsum' filler text?

Cicero's original passage argues that pleasure should be sought rationally rather than on impulse. The garbled version spread in the 1960s on Letraset transfer sheets.

Which machine, invented by German-born clockmaker Ottmar Mergenthaler, cast a whole row of metal letters in one piece?

Linotype is short for 'line o' type'. It replaced the slow business of composing every page by hand, one letter at a time, from trays of loose metal sorts.

Which Song dynasty artisan made the world's first movable type from fired clay, four centuries before Gutenberg's press?

Bi Sheng's invention is known only because the polymath Shen Kuo described it in his Dream Pool Essays. A later official wrongly credited the method to Shen himself.

Edward Johnston's sans-serif alphabet, commissioned by Frank Pick in 1913, was created for which city transport network?

London Underground lettering has a quirk: the dots on Johnston's i and j are squares tilted onto a corner. He drew it for print, but it quickly spread to the enamel station signs.

Which British-born type designer created Verdana and Georgia for Microsoft and co-founded the digital foundry Bitstream?

Matthew Carter is the son of the printing historian Harry Carter. He said both screen faces 'were all about binary bitmaps: every pixel was on or off, black or white'.

Which name is given to the ¶ symbol, which grew from a letter C that scribes used to mark a new chapter?

Pilcrow marks began as a C for capitulum, Latin for 'little head'. Rubricators added vertical bars to the C and filled its curve with ink until it looked like today's paragraph mark.

Which punctuation mark did adman Martin Speckter propose in 1962 to merge a question mark and an exclamation point?

Interrobang joins 'interrogative point' to 'bang', printers' jargon for the exclamation mark. By 1968 it had its own key on some Remington typewriters.

Which name did Bell Labs engineers invent for the # symbol when adding two extra keys to the telephone keypad?

Octothorpe was coined because the engineers wanted names for the symbols on their new eleventh and twelfth keys. The word first turned up in a US patent filed in 1973.

Which Microsoft symbol font caused a stir when typing 'NYC' produced a skull, a Star of David and a thumbs-up?

Wingdings prompted a firm denial from Microsoft, which insisted the arrangement of its symbols was largely random. The later Webdings deliberately turned the same letters into an eye, a heart and a skyline.

Which design principle, rooted in Gestalt psychology, uses size, boldness and position to show what to read first?

Visual hierarchy relies on contrast between elements, which makes some stand out and creates a perceived order of importance. Designers use it to guide the eye through a page in a set sequence.

Which CSS at-rule, introduced in CSS2, lets a web page download a typeface that is not installed on a visitor's device?

@font-face freed designers from the short list of fonts found on nearly every computer. Without it, a browser that lacks the chosen font quietly swaps in a similar alternative.

Which compressed file format, proposed in 2010 by Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft, was built to deliver fonts to web pages?

WOFF stands for Web Open Font Format. It is a wrapper that compresses an ordinary TrueType or OpenType font, typically shrinking a TrueType file by more than 40 percent.

Which CSS unit sizes text relative to the font size of a page's root element rather than the parent element?

rem stands for 'root em'. A plain em, by contrast, is relative to the font size of the element itself or of its parent.

Which typeface technology, announced in 2016 by four rival tech giants, stores a continuous range of styles in one file?

Variable fonts let software call up any design in between the extremes the file defines, not just a few fixed styles. That flexibility suits layouts that adapt to different screens.

What do web designers call the ordered list of fallback typefaces a browser can try if its first choice is missing?

Font stack fallbacks matter because no site can guarantee that a visitor has a given typeface installed, and even a downloaded web font can fail to load.

Which company developed the TrueType font format in the late 1980s as a rival to Adobe's PostScript fonts?

Apple then licensed TrueType to Microsoft to make sure it was widely adopted, undercutting Adobe's wish to keep its own format closed to all but its licensees.

Which term do typographers use for the length of a line of text, ideally about 66 characters on a printed page?

Measure is generally kept between 45 and 75 characters per line. On the web, setting a column's width in the CSS unit ch holds it near a chosen count whatever the text size.

Which name do typographers give to gaps that snake down a paragraph, a flaw they spot by turning proofs upside down?

Rivers show up most when full justification forces wide spaces between words. They are a coincidence: the spaces on neighbouring lines just happen to line up.

Which term describes the oversized opening letter of a chapter that runs several lines deep into the paragraph?

Drop cap letters sit within the margins and indent the normal-sized text beside them. The original 1609 printing of Shakespeare's sonnets opens with one.

Which pair of terms, often swapped between style guides, names lone lines stranded at the top or bottom of a page?

Widows and orphans are single lines cut off from the rest of their paragraph by a page or column break. A very short final line of a paragraph has a name of its own: a runt.

Which Microsoft typeface sank a document in Pakistan's 'Fontgate' case by appearing a year before its public release?

Calibri was drawn by Lucas de Groot, who described its subtly rounded design as having 'a warm and soft character'. It became the default font in Word with Office 2007.