"With so many of our products designed with typography, we want nothing more than to spread the love of one of our favourite design techniques with you. Typography is the art of arranging typed text into a manner that is aesthetically pleasing. Much more goes into it other than making the words legible, also entailing the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading, and plenty of adjustments.
Typography and the origin of moveable type dates back to Renaissance Europe when Johannes Gutenberg first printed letters as a direct interpretation of the ornate gothic handwriting. A once arcane art, typography now flourishes throughout the world and is more widely accessibly and visible than ever before. With so many dimensions and intricacies that go into the art, we thought we'd share with you some of the most interesting facts about our beloved typography.
1. There are over 455,000 unique individual font files, over 90,000 typefaces and over 25,000 font families.
2. Times New Roman gets its name from the Times of London, where it was created and first published.
3. In 1984, Apple licensed Times Roman for the Macintosh and in 1992 Microsoft licensed Times New Roman for Windows.
4. 60% of websites use Sans-Serif typefaces like Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, and Lucida Grande, such as BBC and CNN.
5. On April 1 st, 2011, whenever someone googled “Helvetica†the results displayed the typeface Comic Sans.
6. Helvetica is the chosen font for iPhones and iPods.
7. Typefaces can range from costing nothing to more than £50.
8. All 7 Harry Potter books are written in Adobe Garamond.
9. The London Underground has been using New Johnston since 1979.
10. There have been multiple campaigns to ban Comic Sans due to people using it in serious context, which it was not intended for.
Now that you know some of typography's most fun, and random, facts we thought we'd give you a little knowledge of some technical terms so you can sound like an expert too. The term leading describes the vertical space between each line of type. It's called this because strips of lead were originally used to separate lines of type back in the days of metal typesetting. Kerning refers to the adjustment of space between characters in order to create a harmonious pairing. Similarly but still different, tracking is the spacing of all the characters.
Now that you know the ins and outs of this art and technique check out various Victoria Eggs' products, such as the Cockney Rhyming Slang, London Underground, Scottish Dinner, and English dinner collections, brilliantly designed with typography. As a new typography expert, you might look at these designs a tad differently now!"