And a magazine called “font”? Wasn’t this supposed to be the Online Age? Doesn’t every PC have dozens of free fonts installed? Shouldn’t we have less of them, rather than add to the visual clutter around us?

Well, you wouldn’t be reading this magazine if there wasn’t a basic need for more typographic knowledge amongst designers regardless of the medium in which they work. We may know that among the 25,000 or so typefaces out there we would find the one just right for the next project, if we only knew where to start looking. Of course, all digital foundries now have web sites, and you can go there and check out their libraries—even key in your own words in large sizes. But let’s face it, it’s just a line, black on white, anti-aliased on a screen, in a neutral environment, without context. And context is what we designers generate. Put one letter next to another one and everybody will read this as a word. It’s the human condition to try and make sense out of any message presented to us. Nothing exists in isolation. Type needs to be seen in context, the way it was meant to be read. To really find out whether a typeface will work, you have to work with it, or at least see how other designers have worked with it.

For this first issue, we feature LettError, the talented team of Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum. They recently received the Charles Nypels 2000 prize for typography in The Netherlands and produced a masterful book for the occasion. It documents their work over the last decade. This book has been selected as one of the best designed Dutch books of 2000.

Erik and Just were amongst the first designers for the FontFont library, just after they joined me at MetaDesign in Berlin about 12 years ago. They invented the first random font (FF Beowolf), digitized their handwriting as FF Justlefthand and FF Erikrighthand, came up with the hugely successful collection of FF Instant Types and have performed their digital Punch & Judy show around the world.

Also, font looks at Philippe Apeloig’s posters which merge a European sensibility with American technology. I first met Philippe at April Greiman’s studio in Los Angeles back in 1987. His native France wasn’t exactly known for producing a lot of typographic designers, but Philippe almost single-handedly changed that after his return to Paris. He is now back in the USA and teaches at The Cooper Union in New York. Philippe is determined to incorporate international influences into American aesthetics.

Those behind font from FontShop include contributors Margaret Richardson and Peter Hall. Richardson writes frequently on design and typography. A resident of Portland, Margaret teaches the History of Modern Design course at Portland State University, is the Design Doyenne columnist for creativepro.com and author of Type Graphics. Peter, based in New York, is a contributor to Metropolis and Interiors magazines and The Guardian newspaper in London. He is co-editor of Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist and writer of the Stefan Sagmeister monograph, Sagmeister: made you look. He teaches at Yale.