October 8, 2024

I used to teach Desktop Publishing back in the hay day of DTP. The Macintosh was the best choice of many magazines and everyone was a Publisher all of a sudden. Newsletters were the rage, and everyone wanted to put one out. I happen to also have worked on laying out coupons and others with a Pica ruler. I got to know at the time there were two major types of fonts, Serif and San-Serif and when and where to use each.

It was, and continues to be, a little humor to have students give an example of a ‘font’. They usually just get stuck with NewYork, Helvetica, Courier or such. After a while someone says Arial 10pt, which gets closer. Its then that get to talk typesetting and leading and more. The act of pulling down menus to names of typefaces, then selecting styles and point sizes changed the world.

Now comes the use of fonts in things like Movie Posters, Graphics and more. Graphics especially as the ‘font’ has its challenges when you are on the web. Its also quite interesting that the Web has not really moved passed Arial, Helvetica, Times and Times New Roman.

Here’s an interesting article on Movie Posters and Fonts. Take a read, then think on how some of this applied to today’s world.

Building on Typography Trends in Movie Poster Design