Font
Listening to the Indicast’s new offspring, Amuk amuk series — specifically the chat about fonts, brought back my font-nostalgia.
I have always been fascinated by fonts, as long as I can remember, and long before computers came into my life. It started back in my primary school (around 1980, I think) when writing became more of a ‘carving’.
My favorite, at the time, was Gothic. Its complicated lines and curves intrigued me, and I spent countless hours perfecting my strokes, without really knowing the right way of doing it. In high school, finally, my drawing teacher took-up a class on fonts. He taught us to draw Times Roman, to start with. It was the most geometrically correct method of producing fonts on paper1, and it dawned on me that there was indeed a method to this madness after all.
In my second year engineering, as a course requirement, I was introduced to architectural fonts, and the ones that I had most fun drawing. My profound love for fonts didn’t go unnoticed. When I joined Gammon India (Gammon House, Prabhadevi - Worli, circa 1995) as a Junior Engineer2, my peers and senior designers noticed that I could draft and write on official tracings, in permanent ink, without using construction lines or stencils.
The other most memorable thing was when my teachers, in graduate school, requested and retained my journals as a reference for teaching the next-gen kids. They told me that my journals were by far the best work ever done. This has always been a cloud 9 thing for me.
Then, computers came along and my (font) skills started rusting. I lost interest, simply because I had too much on my plate. There was a lot to learn in those early years as a young engineer, and working late nights became a routine. My days in John Brown drifted off so quickly that I lost track of time. Occasionally, whenever I did hand-calculations, I used spend some time sketching and labeling, but that was really it.
Computers took over what little we did by hand, and even my handwriting took a serious hit. So much that my wife refuses to believe I had a decent handwriting3 
. I don’t really blame her because I wrote most of my post-engagement letters to her on a computer. She complained about the occasional handwritten letters and said, you better type. So much for my font skills.
Another downside to my font-obsession was that because I worked on so many typefaces, I actually did not have a handwriting of my own to identify with. Seriously. So in a sense, I had lost it. It was because of this reason, when I started my site, my first site logo was hand-drawn (and scanned) — a futile effort to retain an identity.
Then, for a while, I did font embedding using WEFT using a font of my choice to display my content. That was before the semantic web dawned on me, and before Mr Zeldman cast a spell with his thought-provoking book, which forever changed the way I looked at the web. I have long since left that method for clear and supported web fonts.
If you’re keen on knowing how fonts evoloved, here’s a beautiful primer by Dean Allen of Textism and the creator of the amazing Textpattern and Textile markup.
I have outgrown the obsession, but not the love for beautiful fonts. My current favorite print font is: Union. It’s only when you print it, you’ll realize its beauty. It is an absolute stunner. I have been using it since 2004 and I am yet to outgrow it.
- We started with construction lines: first, we drew parallel lines of about 2 inches apart. Then, we divided those lines in square boxes of 2 inches. Each font had a space for kerning and decorating ends. I particularly enjoyed drawing an A, S and M. The letter C (first letter of my name) wasn’t so interesting :). Drawing fonts was so much fun. [←]
- Every engineer was made to work on drawing board first for a couple of months, as a tradition and to respect drafting and designer’s work. [←]
- Only a few close college buddies, like Govind Kanshi, Aijaz Ahmad Rajgoli (man, where art thou?), Bharat Raj Pathak, and a few others, know about it. [←]