
Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who’s the fairest of them all? Why, it’s you silly, Design Twitter! While this week marked a slowish return to our regular social media programming (looks like our holiday wish for a reprieve from online oversharing was granted), Twitter’s actual design account @mentioned just about every major design-leaning person asking about their hopes and dreams for all design-leaning things in 2020—including the mayor of Design Twitter himself:
What are your hopes for Design Twitter in 2020, @round?
— Twitter Design (@TwitterDesign) January 1, 2020
In an uncharacteristically bashful moment, he remained silent and offered no reply. The clock on making nonsense of predictions is ticking!
Meanwhile, the first of the year had us wondering if maybe all of Twitter was becoming Design Twitter, with this tweet from author R.O. Kwon suggesting typography is… better than sex.
yeah sex is etc., etc., but have you ever, at long last, changed the font from Times New Roman to Garamond RIGHT BEFORE sending a piece to your editor
& watched the words, all at once, get a little more beautiful
— R.O. Kwon (@rokwon) January 1, 2020
Cue the TNR bashing, the unsexiest of fonts.
TNR is *ugly* and hard to read.
Hate it.(And I think the “new” part is a lie.)
— Jim Snell (@RealJimSnell) January 1, 2020
The revealing of one of editorial’s most greatly held secrets.
No no, it’s for me! But also I know of more than a few editors who hate TNR, can’t bear looking at it
— R.O. Kwon (@rokwon) January 1, 2020
Some literary magazines have even started requesting Garamond!
I actually submitted this month to a lit mag that requested Garamond. My words did look oddly prettier and better like the font change was changed with a Harry Potter wand. 🙂
— Amy Barnes (@amygcb) January 1, 2020
Love for Garamond met a critical mass on Literary Twitter.
I really wanna name our next dog Garamond/Garry
— diandra oliver (@sinkshipsss) January 1, 2020
Then it hit actual Design Twitter.
times new roman is for the working class, garamond is for the 1% https://t.co/UtHg92B9mb
— Erik Carter (@erikinternet) January 1, 2020
And then it died. At any rate, writers have lots of feelings about the font they choose to write in, as we found out when we asked a bunch of them last year. Brace yourselves: “All screenwriters write in Courier.”
That breath of fresh egalitarian air (Courier for everyone!) was quickly stifled with another type Twitter dust up, this time over the actual cost of licensing a typeface. In a rebuttal to a Mashable piece about why technology companies are ditching font licensing for custom type, Jonathan Hoefler schooled us on the economics of creating, maintaining, and purchasing typefaces.
I wish journalists would stop repeating this inane idea that there are brands paying “millions of dollars a year” to use a font. It’s not even imaginable that there could be circumstances in which this is possible. Please give it some thought & scrutiny. https://t.co/CNbqA7gbZY
— Hoefler&Co. (@HoeflerCo) December 30, 2019
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If you thought designing typography is a dark art, just try sussing out how much it costs to license the final product at scale. Hoefler fairly takes issue with the popular assessment that licensing fonts is often millions of dollars more expensive than creating custom solutions, claiming that the foundry “never quoted a client anything close to a million dollars for anything.” If only…
And we wish the “Million dollars a year”! That would be great, such as unicorns.🦄
— DSType Foundry (@DSType_Foundry) December 30, 2019
Without getting a look at the books for big tech companies, it’s impossible to say how much licensing a font like Gotham really cost the Netflixes of the world, but that’s almost besides the point. Hoefler rallied the type troops with some real talk about just how much work a custom typeface actually is, and they’re not always the best choice.
What actually happens is that custom fonts are frozen in time: they’re fossils that don’t benefit from updates, upgrades, format changes, bug fixes, or expansion without the investment of the company that paid for them. The off-the-rack font grows by itself. →
— Hoefler&Co. (@HoeflerCo) December 30, 2019
We’re sure you have opinions, but before you chime in, we require that you take this typography quiz to test your knowledge of the subject matter.
Kerning, the video game: https://t.co/othLqJRTR3
— Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99) December 31, 2019
That was tough, huh? Don’t ask us our score—we’re not telling. On that note, we’ll leave you with a confidence booster. Here’s one more optical design illusion that even the most informed among us can’t seem to figure out.
— ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ (@DuaneKing) December 31, 2019