I concur with you on point #5. Hopefully, the trend will shift in 2008.

#7 — wonder why? :^)

#9 would be radical. I would never have to leave my couch. Well, I do have a PC with FontLab hooked up to my LCD TV so I really don’t have to leave my couch anyway. ;-)

>#9 would be radical.

Thinking about it, a Wii based font editor would be even cooler - imagine waving that controller thingy around and drawing shapes.

# 10 Adobe/MS announces FAK — Font Activation Key

Given all the Battlestar Galactica fans around here, maybe “FRAK” would be more likely - “Font Rights Activation Key”.

...or TAK — Typeface Activation Key (so no F word :) )

Getting out my oh so cloudy crystal bs machine....

Trends for 2007 & 2008! The vision comes...

In spring of 2007 Woodtype will join the Script to make a triumphant return and cause readability mavens and purists to moan but extending and the life of the design trend towards embelishment & decoration. Apologists will point to the excellence of the core forms. Colors that dominate are sepia browns, pinks, oranges and dark acid greens to be replaced by light prussian blues, light acid greens, and candy apple red in summer. Overload of the senses is noted by mainstream media as elaborate pen and ink drawings a la ’drummer hoff’ are animated in tv ads. Inexpensive laser based paper cutters will proliferate which will give rise to decoration being cut into paper as well. The paper chips or chits will get everywhere. The trend will end with the brief rise of the tophat and spats as fall fashion.

Near the end of the year the the above trend will burn out to bereplaced by severe & nearly sterile neo-swiss modernist code junky style. FontFont and other indie monos will dominate. Editors will try to count chracters to create perfect word squares. Contents suffers accordingly. The prefered photostyle will be cameraphone. Adobe will relase a filter to make regular photos look like cameraphone photos. It and other filters will be sold on itunes in bundles with other media including fonts as Apple takes a swipe at Linotype for grabbing it’s UI ideas. A trend towards avoiding printing in black ink will be noted giving the monocode style a modicum of liveliness. This along with a trend towards unbleached paper will soften the otherwise harsh style. By spring of 2008 tshirts with individual mono letters will be popular letting groups of people make graphic statements at will. People with vowels will be popular. People insisting on wearing x & q will be less so. Some people will carry 3 or 4 shirts with them to widen their expressive potential. This fashion trend will be killed in the summer by news coverage during the presidential race in which rival messages spelled out by tshit wearing ad agency paid youth sours hipsters on the formerly popular trend.

Fall will brings back the 80’s high contrast letters closely spaced headlines and a faux naive style of layout. Hairline fonts will also be popular. Film sales and use rise as the ’real film’ style emerges. Young designers complain about the expense and inconvenience of film. The many new ligatures available for Avant Garde are used. ’Garamonds’ are everywhere. Palatino too. Cheap glossy thin paper comes back. Black finally comes back into use. In fact much talk about which black to use is noted. Varnish is popular again. Sepia toned photos with chemical stains are seen by Winter. Blackletter is no longer popular on the backs of trucks and vans. It is replaced by serif and sans font all-swashap expression including the now ubiquitous Comic Sans Flair and Helvetica Flair. This trend evetually makes it all the way into Mexico and Hawaii where popsickle and icecream trucks begin using all flair Comic Sans Flair. Microsoft releases an unusual but much needed patch to Vista a huge file with thousands of lines of code -of course: Contextually sensitive ’Comic Sans Flair Notan Edition’. It is the largest font in terms of sheer data footprint ever in part because it supports the full unicode range - but really because of the exponential possibilities introduced by context sensitivity. PC makers rejoice because the requires upgraded hardware to run. Third world countries continue to use the basic Comic Sans Flair for decades.

The vision fades...