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    There are two main categories (visual styles) of typefaces, Serif and Sans-serif. Serif type has little "strokes" or "wings" on the end of the letterforms. Sans-serif fonts, as the name suggests, are without "serifs". Serif fonts are considered more traditional, and the style of the strokes on the ends of the letters comes from the tradition of hand lettering where the scribe would naturally finish the letterform with the decorative strokes. The introduction of sans-serif fonts is a relatively new thing historically. They gained prominence in the 1920's (though they had been around for a while), but were considered by many to be shocking and ugly.

    This font is Ariel, which is an example of a Sans-serif font.
    This font is Times New Roman, which is a Serif font.

    You may encounter many other descriptive categories for fonts, such as "computer-related", "decorative", "funny", "symbol", and so forth. When you use fonts, you should be mindful of the associations that the viewer will bring with them as they view the font. Our goal in this class is to communicate personal vision, and you should be aware of how different fonts change the message being communicated.

    Digital fonts are actually mini-software programs that are rendering your letters according to their characteristics. There are two main types of digital fonts: PostScript and TrueType. PostScript fonts have two components, a screen element file for displaying the font on your screen and a printer file to print the font accurately. TrueType fonts combine these two elements into one file for both display and printing. The distinctions between the two types of fonts become more important if you are doing work to be commercially printed (offset press) because not all printing shops support both kinds of fonts (if you were doing a commercial job, you would need to check with the printing shop.) For this class, however, we will be able to work with both kinds as we create our artwork. To read more about digital fonts, you might read "Font Fundamentals" by Thomas Detrie. To learn more about TrueType fonts, you might read "A History of TrueType."

    Fonts are specific to either Mac or Windows operating systems. There are converters available, so that you can convert a font from one operating system to the other. To convert a PC font to a Mac font, you might use TTConverter, which is available for free on the web.

    To use a font, it must be installed on that computer. If you have a computer file that uses a specific font, you must have that font installed on every machine that you wish to use to work on the file. On a Mac, you open the hard drive, click the system folder, and copy the font into the fonts folder. You will have to quit any open applications to reload the font list. On a PC machine, you open "My Computer," click the "Windows" folder, and then copy them into the fonts folder. This is the manual way to add fonts. There are also programs, such as Adobe Type Manager, that will track, catalog, and install your fonts on an "as needed" basis. Having too many fonts on a computer at one time may slow it down, so if you have many, you will want to keep a master archive of your fonts, possibly sorted by catagory.

    Fonts on the web are generally Freeware, Shareware, or Licensed. For our class, we are looking for freeware fonts for possible use in our future projects. Try to find fonts that you like or that you respond to on some level. It may be a seed for a future project.

    Use a search engine to search for freeware fonts. A search engine is a database of web sites that have been collected by a "spider program" navigating the web. Try different search strings. You might try "freeware fonts," "mac fonts," and "custom fonts," among many other variations. If you enter a phrase in quotations in a search engine, you will limit the search engine to that specific phrase. If there are no quotes around the phrase, then the search engine will return results of any pages that contain those words, but not necessarily those words in the same order or even in the same sentence or paragraph. Different search engines will return different results, so try searching on several different engines.

    A few Search Engines (there are many others):

    Here's some Font sites as starting places. Some are free, some are not. I want you to look around and see what's out there, though.

    By the end of class today, I'm expecting you to have located at least 4 different MAC fonts to contribute to a class archive. You may contribute more if you choose. I'll pass around a zip disk; please copy your fonts to it.

Questions? Shoot me an e-mail.