Saturday, April 4, 2009

With numbers there are more restrictions, and there’s more freedom at the same time. You look at some typefaces and you wonder where the numbers came from. The truth is, they were probably added later. There is a sort of generic set of numbers that can always be integrated into almost any typeface. If you look at the Century School font, for example, that’s the sort of generic – especially American – typeface of the 1800s. It has a specific set of numbers, but you could put those same numbers into almost any other typeface and they wouldn’t look out of place because numbers have their own shapes, different from characters; they’re standing alone anyway. So there’s actually quite a bit of leeway because they only have to conform to each other. The weight has to be kind of the same: the 1 has to look like a 1; the 4 like a 4, but not necessarily like the A or the B. That’s the weird thing.

No comments:

Post a Comment