What are Fonts? Concepts for On-line and Print Publications Part 1

Perhaps as old as writing, is the style we choose to express our written words.

We encounter, view and read letter images or fonts everyday. Whether on a billboard, in a newspaper, in a business card, advertisement, website or email, graphic designers vie for your attention by manipulating the fonts, the character "images or glyphs" you read.

The word font or fount has root in the Latin word fountain, and just as a fountain serves a "source" of water, so too the font serves as a source for visual information and audience reaction.

Prior to mass printing technologies, manuscripts or texts were created by hand, and the letters drawn exhibited the flourishes, tastes and motives of the person holding the writing tool. Thicknesses in letters, severeness of curves, slants, and letter spacing were manipulated for readability, decoration, and importance of message.

Over time, the variety of artistic influence in letter character styles transfered to mass printing technologies, and publishers soon had a pool of character "image" styles or fonts to apply to the published word.

Today, the font in the online and print on demand (POD) environment is still a specific design set for characters and these characters are usually but not restricted to the alphabet.

Fonts are intrinsic or crucial to "styles of presentation" of information, therefore there are many conventions or traditions followed in their application to text.

For instance, the font type or presentation of a printed news article or school essay is still, traditionally Times New Roman. Times New Roman is a font type. Words written in Times New Roman font look different and will have a different effect on the audience, then words written in another font.

The largest visible distinction between font types is the prescence or absence of a "serif". With word roots in Dutch, German and Latin, all referring to "stroke, write, or scribe," Serif refers to the inclusion of a decorative stroke to a letter that resembles a "tail"; it is the short lines stemming from and at an angle to the upper and lower ends of the strokes of a letter.

Sans-Serif - sans meaning "without" in French- means "without serif" or without the added strokes to the letter. Characters in the sans-serif font styles do not have flourishes or tails to the letter's character lines.

Distinctions between Serif and sans-serif fonts are the basis for online versus print readability. By convention, serif fonts ( fonts with additional strokes) are still preferred in print whereas san-serif fonts are encouraged by Online Accessibility advocates for all online publications. The reason for the distinction lies with the legibility of text on paper vs on the screen. Sans-serif fonts (fonts without strokes) display cleaner or look less fuzzy on a computer monitor.

As with all creative endeavors, fonts have ownership, and are named according to their use or creator. There are countless styles of fonts available for purchase. Even the fonts included in software packages are licensed and may or may not have restrictions to their use, therefore it is incumbent upon the publisher, author and designer to honor copyright holders or use fonts copyright free through the public domain.


About the Author: Olga Sprague is an author, photographer and a college online instructor in Computer Graphics and Web Design for the State University of New York

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