Quotes & Sayings About Typefaces

I hate to see great works of literature ghettoized, whereas others that conform to the rules, conventions, and procedures of the genre we call literary fiction get accorded greater esteem and privilege. I also have a problem with how books are marketed, with certain cover designs and typefaces. They're often stamped with an identity that has nothing to do with their effect on the reader. — Michael Chabon

The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile. — Will Self

I guess if there was a desert island scenario and I only could take one font with me, I guess it would be Helvetica, though it has it's limitations, I think it's incredibly versatile and gets the job done and I also think it's one of the typefaces that will really survive the test of time beyond the next several decades if not into the next century. — Khoi Vinh

The most popular typefaces are the easiest to read; their popularity has made them disappear from conscious cognition. It becomes impossible to tell if they are easy to read because they are commonly used, or if they are commonly used because they are easy to read. — Zuzana Licko

Saying that studying the brain is limited to the study of physical entities would be like saying that literary criticism must focus on paper and bookbinding, ink and its chemistry, page sizes and margin widths, typefaces and paragraph lengths, and so forth. — Douglas R. Hofstadter

Unlike painting, sculpture, or music, typefaces must be useful to someone. Fortunately for designers, the digital age has produced new problems to solve - developing typefaces that work on mobile phones, for one - and enabled better solutions to old problems. — Virginia Postrel

Anyone who uses Helvetica knows nothing about typefaces. — Wolfgang Weingart

The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the typeface, and that is why we loved Helvetica very much. — Wim Crouwel

All typefaces are historical. — Jonathan Hoefler

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. — Steve Jobs

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. — Steve Jobs

One of my colleagues is convinced that having a wide range of types to choose from is a complete waste of time. He swears by two typefaces: Gill (1928) and Frutiger (1975), which he uses for road signs (among other things). ( ... ) [U]ntil 1975, the year in which Adrian Frutiger's eponymous typeface came onto the market, my colleague could only have made half of his selection. It seems to me that this proves the case for continuing to design new typefaces. — Gerard Unger

In the new computer age, the proliferation of typefaces and type manipulations represents a new level of visual pollution threatening our culture. Out of thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones, and trash the rest. — Massimo Vignelli

There are a lot of conventions, a vocabulary and a set of practices and assumptions that underlie most professional book design. Since design is important to the eventual success of your book whether you attempt to do it yourself or hire it out, it pays to know something about those conventions and assumptions. After all, we don't want anything getting in the way of your communication with your readers. You've got a message for them, a story to tell, or ideas to spread. That's what's important. — Joel Friedlander

A great typeface is not a collection of beautiful letters, but a beautiful collection of letters. — Walter Tracy

How can there be too many typefaces in the world? Are there too many songs, too many books, too many places to go? — Rian Hughes

My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson. — Jorge Luis Borges

Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages. — Steven Heller

Type is saying things to us all the time. Typefaces express a mood, an atmosphere. They give words a certain coloring. — Rick Poynor