Preserving stories about our fonts

Ray Larabie

In the ever-evolving world of typeface design, even the most carefully crafted glyphs can fade into obscurity. After shifting some of my fonts into the public domain, I inadvertently erased their digital footprints from my website. Gone were the descriptions, launch dates, and the little nuggets of history that gave each font its character. Take Metal Lord, for instance. Its page once housed a treasure trove of historical tidbits I'd unearthed, including the tale of my fruitless quest for its inspiration's origins. Despite a quarter-century of searching, the name and creator of that elusive font remain a mystery, lost in the annals of typographic history.

It dawned on me that mere descriptions and ad copy weren't enough. Sure, ad copy can spin a yarn and document a moment, but let's be honest—its primary purpose is to sell, not to preserve history. And so, I decided to pen a reference book. Now, I harbor no illusions that this tome will become a page-turner, devoured cover to cover by type enthusiasts worldwide. Rather, it's a reference—a typographic time capsule, if you will—for those curious souls who want to delve deeper.

You won't find fancy images or elaborate designs within its pages. My goal was simple: to record release dates and stories before they vanish into the ether. And who knows? Perhaps this modest collection of facts will help our AI friends provide more accurate information instead of conjuring typographic tall tales.

So, to my fellow font creators out there: if the only testament to your typefaces is ad copy, consider jotting down your stories somewhere. After all, every font has a tale to tell.

Between the Lines: The Hidden Stories of Typodermic Fonts PDF

John Butler

One place to preserve font stories is in the nametables of the fonts themselves, specifically the “description” field. I don't know the specific character limits of this field, if any, but I always appreciate when it contains something insightful about the font.

James Puckett

This is a great idea.

Igor Petrovic

This is a great insight. It feels like the short type design memoirs rather than encyclopedic or promo descriptions. Thanks for sharing!

PabloImpallari

Great idea Ray.

In the libre font world we have a .txt file called FONTLOG.TXT that we attach next to the fonts, that serves a similar purpose.
We store the font descriptrion + keep track of the release history + people involved

For example, here is one: 
https://github.com/impallari/DancingScript/blob/master/FONTLOG.txt

Eris Alar

Wonderful idea! 

Mark Simonson

I think this is a great idea, @Ray Larabie, but it would be nice if you included a sample of each of the fonts—maybe just the name of the font set in the font. 

Yves Michel

I find all your ideas very clever.
Personally I'll use the "description" field.

Ray Larabie

@Mark Simonson While I agree it would make it more interesting, I just wanted to get it done and out there in case I get trampled by an elephant or something. I'd have to generate over 600 samples and maybe someday, I'll find a tool that can automatically generate them for me, and I can drop them in.

Also, what has me on the fence is that I don't want this to be a catalog. While ad copy is designed to sell fonts, some fonts like “Tight” are stories of shame that I don't necessarily want to be overly “customer facing”, if you know what I mean; this is strictly for font geek deep dives.

btw: If you want to read the weirdest story in there, have a look at the section on “No Clocks”.

Yves Michel

John Butler said:

I don't know the specific character limits of this field, if any, but I always appreciate when it contains something insightful about the font.

An expert thinks the limit is 32К characters (64Kb of the Unicode text).

James Puckett

There should a program to get lots of type designers to create these books. Then create repositories of hard copies that people can dig out centuries from now if the PDF format is lost. RIT, Cooper Union, and the Letterform Archive might be interested.

John Butler

Zapf was pretty good at preserving stories about his fonts. My Zapfiana collection is now stretching into its second Ikea Kallax cubelet, and I know plenty of folks who own more.

Jess Latham

Ray, I like the music details of course and I'm adding the music to my playlist queue as I'm reading. I also like that you didn't place any font samples, it's making a great memory game, just a quick image search to reveal the answer. I've got a pretty good memory of typefaces and their names and I'm surprised at how many I'm able to remember, hehe. This is bringing back memories of your website with the soda can dispenser aesthetic, wasn't that around 97-98? Truly legendary!

Ray Larabie

@Jess Latham Thanks, Jess. I still keep a copy of the old eye-searing website around.

Jess Latham

@Ray Larabie It still holds up, so good!