I recently learned the Japanese have a word for this affliction I tend to suffer from. “Tsundoku” is the questionable habit of acquiring books without reading them, letting them pile up on shelves or floors or nightstands. I still read a lot, but because most of it happens online that doesn’t really help with the physical book situation. Though it is a little early for New Year’s resolutions, I decided to jump the gun and have been going through my reading pile lately. This is why this new series of book reviews, now on FontShop News, will be a mix of recent and less recent publications. I hope it will be good enough an excuse to help me catch up on all those tomes that tempt and taunt me on the shelves of my library.

After expanding his award-winning Novel family into a type system consisting of a serif, a sans serif, a rounded sans, a monospaced, and hairline variants, Christoph Dunst is now applying the ‘one form, many typefaces’ principle to his idiosyncratic Heimat.

It’s around this time each year the rescued poinsettia on my desk in the San Francisco office starts to push out its tiny red leaves, signaling the end of Thanksgiving and a start to the larger Christmas / Hanukkah / New Years holiday season.

… to the real typographic life.

Twenty-five years ago when FontShop first launched, we sent out printed collateral that allowed customers to judge typefaces in their original form. Then along came the Internet, forcing us to show pictures of typefaces (as GIFs) on the FontShop website rather than the fonts themselves.

However, today marks the beginning of a whole new era for FontShop.com users. For the time has come for us to finally be able to show fonts in their element, live and optimized for the screen. This means saying goodbye to simulation and hello to the power of true typographic magic, from now on what you see is quite literally what you get.

A typeface is a system in itself: a number of individual characters are designed to relate to each other to perform rhythm and consistency – a carefully balanced relation of form and counter form, black and white. Hermann Zapf once said: “I could try to draw each letter so that it stood in graceful relation to the other twenty-five.” ¹ While less than 100 glyphs within a single font (a California Job Case consisted of 89 compartments) was common at the time of his statement (1965), over 1,000 has become a rather usual number of glyphs in recent years. What’s more, the demand on this system of relationships immediately increases with the designer’s decision to add further weights, widths or styles. Each glyph then has to successfully function in additional variations, which all share basic characteristics to form a harmonious and consistent visual system.