Part 4:  Numerals and Punctuation—by Paul Dean
“The very air of the room seemed charmingly alive with little floating dollar signs and fat little ciphers, commas, more ciphers, all winging around happily, waiting for a mere scratch of the pen to call them into action.”
—Dawn Powell, Angels on Toast, 1938.
The Roman alphabet came equipped with its own numbering […]

Part Three: The ‘Black Art’ — by Paul Dean
An invisible grid of parallel horizontal lines is used as a constant reference in the creation of a font. It resembles a musical score and its four (or five) horizontal lines represent, from top to bottom, the ascender line (the height of the highest ascender), which is sometimes equivalent […]

Part 2: Anatomy of a Letterform — by Paul Dean
“I was killing time and pain at a nearby bar called The Ear, so named because the two ribs of the ‘B’ in the neon sign that read ‘Bar’ had burned out years ago. So had most of the patrons.”—Kinky Friedman, Blast From the Past, 1998.
Just as Kinky Friedman anthropomorphizes […]

Part 1: The Detection of Types — by Paul Dean
The detection of types is one of the most elementary branches of knowledge to the special expert in crime. — The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902.
Our modern English alphabet is a child of the Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet, which evolved from a western version of the Greek alphabet approximately 2,700 years […]

Incunabula
Every subject, from dentistry to dog handling has its own vocabulary — terms that are peculiar (unique) to it. Typography is no exception. Learning the lingua franca (lingo) of type will make typography that much more accessible; and that will, in turn, lead to greater understanding, and hopefully a greater appreciation for all things “type”.
Today we’re going to […]

Welcome to Part II
In part one, Who Shot the Serif?, we learned among other things that serifs — like milkshakes — come in many flavours: The main two flavours are Adnate and Abrupt; with Adnate serifs generally being more organic; Abrupt Serifs on the other hand are usually squarer, bigger, chunkier (the Arnold Schwarzeneggers of […]

Typography Terms
One of the reasons for starting I Love Typography was that I felt there just wasn’t enough being said about the topic. Secondly, and more significantly, I always found it difficult to quickly locate typographic resources. The long-term aim of this blog is to be such a resource, a one-stop-shop for everything about typography, […]