I promise this story about fonts is interesting

Admit it, the hardest, most time consuming part of making this video was choosing which fonts to use throughout.

As I used to put it: "Typefaces (aka 'fonts') are clothes for words." From the 'business casual' of Garamond to the 'board shorts' of Mistral to the clownish eccentricity of Jokerman, they are our first impression of the written word. Always dress your words appropriately for the meaning you wish to convey.

My graphic art teacher loved to say "there are NO bad fonts, just BAD USES of fonts. Every font has its place and proper use. Sadly fonts are improperly used too often.

I'm retired from more than 25 years as a typographer & type shop owner. Thank you SO much for making this topic accessible. I could go on for hours and watch most of my listeners' eyes glaze over. You did a fabulous job and have made my communication about this amazing, subtle & eternal effort much easier. And I am beyond thrilled that you included the most important part: that the text typeface is not there to get attention. It is there to facilitate the smooth -- as close as possible to effortless -- flow of your eye, and consciousness, across the page and thru the entire work. Serifs, those little tics at the ends of a pen or brush stroke, help keep your eye on the same line across the page! They are tiny, simple and effective. Every type shop I worked in, coast-to-coast, had the poster "Type is meant to be read." Except in the cases where art is more important than legibility, the fact that textbooks still get printed in san serif typefaces shows not everyone has gotten the message. Oops! Way too long. Blessed Holidays and New Year to all. 🐍💃

I'm a book historian so my knowledge centers mainly on the printing press era. You managed to tell a giant story in a cohesive and thrilling way! Great job.

I’m always going to trust someone who starts my attention with, “I swear this gets interesting”. The mundane is always the coolest thing, because we’ve ignored the things right in front of us.

I don't know for certain, but my hypothesis about why Font was chosen for the computer menu instead of Typeface is simply because Font is half as long. On those early Mac computers with painfully tiny screens, that additional space mattered. They tried to keep those menu names short: File, Edit, View, Font, Tools, etc., so they could fit them all in. They even saved space by making Help an icon of a question mark instead of the written word.

Paul Rand was my professor at Yale school of design in Switzerland. He called me the wild one. It was an honor to be his student. So happy to hear you talk about him. I took 4 semesters of typography back in the day. Great video.

I absolutely love the soft landing at the end. “The next time you feel like humanity 's doomed, we're all isolated and everything is going downhill—just uh; I dono, man—stare a little longer at something you've overlooked—because that desire to connect and the depth of that desire: you can see it in everything, fonts and all.”

I love this line from the end: "They all knew that words could only ever say so much, and so they morphed the glyphs to say even more."

I was a teenager in the mid-90s, when the internet was exploding in popularity & everyone wanted a personal website. I loved the graphic design element, and played around with hundreds of fonts…it is SO cool to hear the backstory of all these fonts, where their names came from & who designed them. I haven’t dabbled in graphic design in a couple decades now, but the names are still so familiar, like old friends. This really was as interesting as promised!

Having worked as a graphic designer and because I'm curious, I already knew quite a bit about what you talk about in this video but you made it so entertaining and fun, I watched all of it without skipping a second! This reminded me of a teacher I had when I was in school. He used to bring magazines all the time and say "Look at this crap! Can you read this?! Nobody can read this! These typefaces should all be banned!!!" ... I wish he would watch this video! 🙂

Surprised you didn't mention the way that Comic Sans was resiliant to the pixelation of aliasing and quite legible at very small scales, which is part of why its letters have some of their weirder shapes. Honestly I think pixelated is Comic Sans's best look.

A good friend that I lost to depression several years ago was a font nut and I know he would have loved the care you put into this. I have a phrase in his custom font tattooed on my ribs. Great work brother!

I'd love to see you cover the typology of Hangul, the Korean writing system. Every time I look at it I'm amazed people could pull this off, and just the sheer amount of labor that goes into it since you have to design every possible combination of how individual letters can be arranged in a syllable! The programming that goes behind it is also mindblowing genius. The whole CJK fonts with Han characters are also fascinating on the sheer inventiveness of new design too. But great video overall!

You were right, this was incredibly interesting. Just learning what dingbats and serifs are was eye opening.

I started having cataracts about the time I began to use a word processor, and vision has to get pretty bad before the insurance companies will cover the surgery. While my vision was impaired, I found that Comic Sans was the easiest font to read. It deserves a lot of respect.

Surprised nothing was said about Arial, which seems to be usurping Helvetica as the ubiquitous font everything uses by default

When I saw this was half an hour long, I didn't think I'd stay for the whole thing, but I never found a good time to go. Really interesting, and I love your delivery style. And the way you ended it, it was just... perfect. Very uplifting. Thank you 🙏

You really did your homework there. A diverse amount of information, too: explaining font classes, its relation to history-history, and of course more than plenty of comprehensive graphics and explanations and humor for morons like us on the internet to understand. There's only so much quality content with artistic and historical integrity out there, and you really nailed it in the sweet spot. I'm subbing.