I am definitely a font geek. I love Times New Roman, strange as it is. It's the default and it just works. You can read it and it doesn't make funny squiggles on the page. I also like Bookman Old Style (it's my email font) and a few others like it. The cursive fonts are pretty but not very readable unless you make them something like size 16.

I absolutely hate Comic Sans MS. In elementary school we had "typing class" (so stupid) and whoever taught us said that Comic Sans MS was her FAVORITE FONT. It's overused way too much, and while you can use Times New Roman on practically everything without overdoing it, you can't really do that with Comic Sans MS. *cringes*

Lol! But it is so similar to Comic Sans that I would still cringe whenever I saw it.

I notice fonts enough to play with them occasionally (I have an old version of FontLab, and did a few minor projects now and then like creating a modified-Albertus "The Prisoner" font). I like Soutane for general text use, but practicality usually dictates Courier New (for work) or Arial/Times New Roman (for other documents that have to be compatible with whatever platform the recipient has).

I'm pretty sure the "Serenity" logo font is "Papyrus" (one of the standards that comes bundled with some Microsoft programs, I think, which is why it shows up so often).

I'd somehow missed the Blambot site until I went looking for Gorilla Milkshake (one of the text fonts used in Erfworld; I had a LOLErf idea that called for it). Naturally, I ended up downloading a bunch of the other fonts. ;-)

I'm not sure I qualify as a font/face geek, but I certainly notice them and have some pretty strong opinions.

There's a special circle of hell reserved for people who use display fonts to set body text. People! There's a good reason that the standard Roman and Gothic typefaces like Times/Garamond/Bodoni/Palatino/Bookman and Arial/Swiss/Helvetica are ubiquitous. They're easy to read! They don't get in the way of your words.

Please don't use more than two or three faces in the same document!

And choose a typeface that matches the tone of your writing. Don't use Comic Sans if you want people to take you seriously.

Oops. Sorry, I was ranting.

Sans-serif is/was great for screen reading (especially before the now on PCs ubiquotuous Anti-Aliasing display technique). For running text they suck - I'm a very fast reader (roughly 200 pages/hour), and sans serifs do not help me keeping the lines.

My favourites for body text are LaTeX' "Computer Modern" and the classic "Garamond" and "Palatino" typefaces. They are simply are the most pleasant to read, IMHO.

Oh yeah. Serious typeface geek here. (And kudos for picking up on the typeface vs. font thing; typeface + size = font.)

My uncle owned a print shop years ago. It's now owned and run by his youngest son. I also took printing in industrial arts class in 7th grade.

I like Eurostile (and it's progenitor, Microgramma Extended), Serpentine (the credits on Babylon 5), Friz Quadrata, Stop, and the ubiquitous Helvetica (although Arial is a cheap knock-off, IMO). Plus a few more I can't think of right now.

Much of my working life has been related to printing, from early PDP-11 type justification and platemaking to color correction and libraries, so I'm at least a minor typeface geek.

Almost any font has some niche where it works, even if the niche is to be deliberately ugly; but a great many fonts should be considered special effects rather than something for normal use. Script fonts, for instance, should be avoided for any serious purpose.

My least favorite is Arial, because it's a Microsoft knockoff of Helvetica.

To me, Courier is something to use for computer code, or in other situations where monospaced text is desirable, such as newsgroups. It's hard to read for large quantities of text.

I'm kind of a font geek, I think. I admit I prefer more artistic fonts (to the point of liking ones that are far from practical, like this one, which is one my favorites). My favorite standard font is Georgia, mostly because I like when the numbers drop down and look staggered.

I am VERY fond of this one, too. It's a sexy variation on a standard Times font, and while it's not professional, it's still very legible.

I was something of a typeface geek back 20-30 years ago -- built a family of bitmap tengwar faces for the predecessor of the Xerox laser printer during my grad student days at Stanford, and wasted a fair amount of time making outlines for my hand-drawn logo font about 15 years later.

I don't really have favorites these days; I've rather lost touch with that world. I use Courier as my main terminal and editing face, Firefox's default faces (whatever they are) for browsing, and Don Knuth's excellent Computer Modern series for typesetting with LaTeX. Lately I've been using Bitstream Vera Sans for address labels.

I do have strong opinions, not so much about typefaces as typesetting style. Sans-serif fonts are great for headings, but really shouldn't be used for body text: they're less readable and it's often impossible to distinguish sets like I, l, 1 and 0, O.

PDF is just plain evil. There's a set of typefaces and typesetting techniques that work well on the screen, a set that work well on paper, and they're completely different! On the screen, at 100dpi or thereabouts, you need slab-serif fonts in a fairly large size to be readable; on paper, at 600-1200dpi, you can get away with tapered serifs and some subtle design features that are just lost on the screen. On paper you can get away with two-column layouts -- they're unreadable when you have to scroll around the page on the screen. And so on.

Most of the time what I want to do is read part of a document -- usually a very small part -- on-screen. I hardly ever print things out anymore.

I not that into it, but I dislike Arial because in small sizes the tight spaces makes words confusing. r and n next to each other for instance. It makes warn look like wam. So I tend to use Verdana or Tahoma typefaces. I even changed my Windows default to one of those. Lo and behold, their appears to be Windows programs who never thought that anywhere in the world that their titles and messages would be displayed in anything but Arial--and that their message boxes just might need to be a bit bigger.

That Serenity font is "Papyrus" - I think this answers question 1. :oD

I like Arial for writing and it's my default. I like the look of "Blackadder" a lot for titles, headlines and so on; for my CD I used "Chiller" (and so does everyone else... :oD) and I really HATE the likes of "Jokerman".

Funny coincidence. Did you know there's documentary called Helvetica? All about, yes, typography and graphic design and so forth.

I have some friends on an anti-Papyrus (Serenity typeface) crusade. Well, not a crusade, really. They just rant about how it's overused everytime they see it, which is often, because it's overused.

One of my roommates was an expert on picking a typefact for making a paper longer/shorter to conform to length guidelines without changing the document margins or the size of the font.

Oh fer sure! I love Arial for business docs and loathe Times New Roman. And I adore more interesting typefaces for personal things.

Another typeface/font lover here. Among others, I really like Bible Script, President, and the now-considered-overused Papyrus (which I loved even before UT coopted it and made all other uses redundant :-) I seem to use the Zapf fonts disproportionately much, including Zapf Elliptical, Zapf Calligraphic, Zapf Humanist (which I use for body type), and of course, his Dingbats.

Here are some of my favorite useful and playful typeface/font links:

Identifont and WhatTheFont
Bembo's Zoo (Flash and non-Flash versions)
Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black (Flash)

So what's the difference between a typeface and a font?

That picture of the type in a tray makes me feel so nostalgic. One of the last oldschool hand-set printing houses in my town shut down recently, after being in business at the same spot for almost a hundred years. We went on a field trip there when I was in elementary school, and watched them pouring molten lead in to molds to make letters & words. I think I got to take home an ampersand. (Adopt a needy ampersand today! Lonely octothorpes are waiting for good homes!)

I guess I qualify as a typeface geek; I use them all the time for work purposes, and I find myself spending waaay too much time messing around with them. I like the way a typeface can get a feeling across in a blatant or an almost subliminal way; pick the right font to set a particular mood you're seeking to get across and it's like magic; all the other parts of the design will tend to fall together much more easily. It's as if the typeface sets the stage.

I love the pic of the letterpress pieces; I got to set type by hand back in Junior High shop class, and I loved it then. Though honestly, computer technology has made everything to do with typefaces explode with innovation and new possibilities.

Um, yeah, I can ramble on a bit about it all...

The first time I ever encountered font snobbery was when I was at a con over 20 years ago. An artist friend with whom I was wandering the dealer's room picked up a filk cassette, said, "I hate 'helvetica'" in a conversational tone, put the cassette box down, and moved down the table. Not knowing what 'helvetica' was, I picked up the cassette, looking for a song, person or reference. After five minutes, at which point said artist had walked over to another table, I ran with cassette box and asked, "Was it in a song? Or one of the performers?" A bit of confusion ensued, followed by the explanation of the font and font preferences.

Oh, I've been a typeface/font geek for years. I used to buy almost industrial quantities of Letraset at one point - in fact, I still have quite a lot (though whether it would still work is another matter!).

I have to say (and then run and hide) that I actually quite like Comic Sans. It's actually quite a nice clear one, and different without being too flowery and overpowering. But I have a vast collection of computer fonts, and when I say vast, I mean VAST. I've lost count rather, but it's up in the hundreds. Mind you, some of them are near-duplicates.

And I've used a geeky typesetter's userpic for you, too. It's an injoke between several of us on #filkhaven.

Q: Are you a font/typeface geek?

A: Not really. Unless they are really obnoxious.

Q: What computer fonts/typefaces do you like? And if you do any writing in MS-Word, what typeface do you use in your text documents? I use Courier New for writing novels and articles.

A: Courier (New) or Fixedsys for fixed-pitch fonts, Times or Helvetica/Arial for proportional fonts.

Q: Do any typefaces bring up good/bad memories? When I see Chicago, for example, I am fondly reminded of my Macs long past.

A: 8x8 and 8x12 fixed fonts remind me of "glass teletypes".

Q: What computer fonts/typefaces do you hate?

A: Comic Sans. And most of the script ones I've seen. Basically anything which is deliberately hard to read because of distorting the letters. On the other hand, deliberately writing text and changing it to use the Symbol font can be fun...

I don't think I'm a typeface geek (thanks for educating me on the difference between fonts and typefaces. I'm sure that's a bit of trivia that will have my friends rolling their eyes at my geekiness) but I know what I don't like and I don't like serif fonts!

My default typeface on my computer (Linux) is just called "Sans". Any my monospace typeface is called, you guessed it, "Monospace". I don't know if they're real typeface names or some free typefaces that have been "appropriated" and renamed.

I find it interesting that movies and TV shows use off-the-shelf typefaces. For some reason I always thought that they would design their own typefaces from scratch, particularly for logos. I'm pretty sure I remember an artist back at Weta Digital drawing the Lord Of The Rings title by hand.

I do all my writing in TNR and most of my emailing in Arial. When I used to do advertising for the County Fair I'd often use Comic Sans in the box ads because it's the most easily readable of the "informal" typefaces.

I sense a serif v. sans-serif split in the comments. I'm in the "sans-serif fonts are only for headings" crowd. On a screen, I prefer Georgia. In print, I set the research journal I edit to Garamond. Book Antigua's pretty good.

For the ultimate in typeface design disasters, check out an eight-typeface car license plate. When it first came out, there were several newspaper columns ridiculing it. EIGHT typfaces??? Sheesh...

Count me firmly in the sans serif camp, even for body text. (Sorry, mdlbear and others.) Always have been, but especially so since I developed Bell's palsy on the left side of my face back in January. It's mostly gone now, but until very recently my eyes didn't work together very well. When eyestrain started to set in (after about 10 minutes at first), serifs would blur and create "shadows" that made it much harder to make out individual letters. I still have tremendous trouble reading the Courier used in LJ comment composition windows.

Re: today's Debbietoon: I've always particularly hated *both* TNR and Courier.

I wonder whether the serif/sans serif divide correlates with other aesthetic preferences. For example, my taste in design runs heavily toward art deco and mid-century modern. Victorian and "country" give me the urge to run screaming within 5 minutes. So do people who like serif fonts also prefer more elaborate styles in decor, architecture, etc?

I just remembered this:

The influence of the great Scottish artist and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh lives on. I once walked into a bid party for the '05 Glasgow Worldcon just in time to hear someone saying to his friends, "I can't believe everyone's heard of this guy but me!" He whirls around and points at the last person through the door -- me -- and says, "Have *you* ever heard of Charles Rennie Mackintosh?"

I calmly replied, "Yes I have, I adore his work, and we're both wearing one of his typefaces on our chests!" (We each had on Glasgow in '05 t-shirts.)

He screamed theatrically and clutched his hair, then started laughing with everyone else.

P.S. Bonus points to anyone who groks the userpic!

Another quick and funny type story. A friend at university worked in the compuer lab. When they got their first (then very advanced) 300dpi laser printer, he created a 5x7 dot matrix font using the actual 300dpi dots.

These days, I keep threatening to create a similar font for the 2400dpi (or better) resolution printers, and print some of our 50- or 100-page books on one, or maybe two, sheets of paper. But then I'd have to go hunt up some half-round magnifiers, and even then, it'd likely be close to unreadable.

I can't call myself a typeface geek, but there are times I break out of the basic Windows set, and typefaces are why I have an ancient copy of Corel Draw.

what drives me crazy are the people who, for such as web pages, force me to user their colour schemes and font sizes. It's not just the problem of stroke-witch and pixel-size interactions (I see a huge jump in readability at 14 points on my machine), it's the way that the RGB dpt-patterns, sub-pixel, can blur edges. In the smaller sizes, which may have a use on a page, any text colour, by turning on a sub-pixel, starts to destroy letter shapes (assuming a white background).

Sometimes it's a browser discrepany in how the colour definitions in the HTML are interpreted.

There are places where Comic Sans works well. Such as comics. But I'm less bothered by the name of a font--I look at things such as the ratio between the em-height and the ascenders/descenders. I know it's not strectly the leading, but how does the font use the space it has, one line to another.

Fonts such as Garamond, to my aging eyes, can work that little bit better than Times Roman (original or knock-off). But if it looks readable to me in TNR, I can be pretty sure we wi;; see the same text.

And I still find the 80x25 DOS window on the text to be a reasonable guide. If you're filling that screen with a single paragraph, it's getting a little long.