Yes. I’ve seen it mentioned here and there among posts, or at least hinted at. It is perfectly normal. Okay, I don’t really know if it is really “normal”, but it happens. The shapes of the letters are very powerful, and the most ungainly are no accident. When you’ve got them on your brain, their ghosts appear everywhere.

The rest of the time, I think people seem to get sucked into consiously IDing and analyzing the typeface choices of others around them. I was flipping through some CDs, and thinking, “Why don’t the labels use more hand lettering?”

Choz Cunningham
!Exclamachine Type Foundry
The Snark

I’d call it “normal”: it’s not dissimilar to the phenomenon experienced by medical students who think they have every disease in the book when at medical school (I’ve got two brothers-in-law who said it was very common).

David,
You have just taken your first step in our 12 step program. Now, repeat after me: “My name is David and I am a Typoholic”

ChrisL

the world will not look the same, just wait to you see all of the not so good “tpyography”

Discovery of letterforms in day-to-day life and in nature can be quite exhilarating...

It’s poor s pacing & bad KER NING that will eventually drive you crazy! ;-)

He must’ve been really stoned to make that one :-)

ChrisL

A great thing to respect letters and nature, David Smith.
You may find interesting to read about Alfred Kallir.

Just wait, eventually you’ll start spotting the barely noticeable angle changes at the inner peaks of V, M, etc. And once that happens, you’ll spot the ink traps when people use certain text faces at sizes they aren’t meant for.

@ Norbert, thanks for the cool pick - funny, I have some stones just like that on my writing desk; also some old pieces of wood inscribed with a squiggly alphabet (made by some beetle just below the bark) - it’s very neat, like an old lost language or something.

@ ChrisL —Now, repeat after me: “My name is David and I am a Typoholic” —

O Crikey, Chris, please, not another 12 step program! Either way they get you: “I’m not a typophile” (well, then it follows that you must be one, DENIAL!) “I am a typophile.” (SEE!)

@ Allessandro (lovely name, my nephew has the same), the Boston Atheneaum library here in Boston is ordering Kallir’s Sign & Design for me. Sounds very interesting. Do you know of anything else along those lines?

@ Jpad, arrrgg, ink traps everywhere! The horror, the horror...

@ all, Thanks!

David,
Is your name after the old Katzenjammer Kids cartoon of yesteryear?

ChrisL

PS: and welcome to the fold!

ChrisL, thank you - so glad to be here!

As for the Katzenjammer handle: I’m using it in terms of “hangover” - actually, I got the word from the Consul, a central character in Under the Volcano; being no 12-stepper, he was always drunk; and at one point also makes a memorable, if questionable, etymological assertion: that he’ll be in “in the cat’s pajamas” in the morning... :-)

Cheers!

Was that the Albert Finney role in the movie from the 1980s? I have a vague memory of the film with Jackie Bissett, I believe.

ChrisL

> Is this a normal reaction to visiting this site and spending time with books on typeface/typography?

When I was teaching typography, I always considered it a victory when students came up to me and told me that they could no longer enjoy TV or the movies without having to critique the type.

> claiming that the letter “v” came from watching geese

Read up on the development of the alphabet. The A is the inverted head of an ox, for example. World Book encyclopedias used to have great articles at the start of each book, explaining the origins of that letter.

@ ChrisL, I’ve never seen the film - I lived in Guatemala for two years after college and, along with my normal trove of books that I drag around, I discovered and adopted Malcolm Lowry’s novel. I couldn’t stop reading it, and I still read it once a year. It’s akin to Joyce’s Ulysses in its focus on words/language - I imagine the film is its own and separate thing...

@ Don, I’d love to learn more about the origins of letters - do you have any book recommendations?

Thanks & Cheers!

David Smith, thanks, my sister was three years old when my parents had to name their new born font, they thought “Cesare” at first, but my sister, who was in the jury, didn’t like it and suggested “Alessandro.” She generated her third font recently, “Ivan.”
Regarding anything else along those lines, I’d say 1989 “Signs and Symbols” by Frutiger.

Hey... I used to love to read about Hans und Fritz in the “Katzenjammer Kids” comic stip.

Now that’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout! :-)

ChrisL

This is so ripe for a comment from Yves ;-)

I did critique and just now starting to ID stuff; more like “Bad, bad kerning” rather than “Oh, TheSans!”

> Don, I’d love to learn more about the origins of letters - do you have any book recommendations?

Yes, as I mentioned, almost every encyclopedia will cover them at the start of each letter. Probably some good stuff on Wikipedia too, but the printed ones are very thorough.

Speaking of... Does anyone get bent out of shape when they see awful contrasting of fonts?

I live in the middle of America and for some reason, it’s everywhere.

Sometimes it gives me a damn headache.

You’ll learn to ignore it eventually.

Like (fill in name of music genre you dislike here, since I don’t want to offend anyone!), if you ignore it long enough, it will just blend into the background

it is said that the letter “A” was originally upside down—that it was a pictogram of an ox. It is also said that the ox’s horns were the origin of the serif. I’ll try and find a reference for this.

edit—i need to start reading entire discussions before i contribute.

“Letter Perfect” by David Sacks— should be a good book to start with.

ChrisL

See also, “Alpha Beta” by John Man.

ChrisL

It’s not only seeing type everywhere, it’s rather wanting to improve it if you see an not perfect letter. And you pity yourself that you can’t...

Last time seeing type: I was playing a downhill skiing computer game, trying to optimize the way through the gates, and all I was thinking of was about beautiful tension of bezier curves...
I’m still 7 seconds slower than the best time, so maybe typedesign is not the very best approach in downhill skiing.

I’m also quite the newbie, but I find myself getting distracted by trying to ID fonts on signs and restaurant menus and the like. On more than one occasion I’ve temporarily dropped out of conversations or caused delays ordering meals because I was still trying to figure out what font the menu was set in. I was quite gratified when I ran across the following quotation:

“I cannot order a meal unless I have identified the font on the menu — drives everyone crazy.” — Erik Spiekermann

(Source:
http://dwr.com/images/newsletter/20061116_spiekermann/index.html)

The worst menu I ever saw was set in Adobe Serif MM. Food was OK though.

s’marks

There have been a few times I have asked for permission to hold onto a menu after placing an order. Once I got some puzzled stares for taking pictures of a menu. *shrug* I had to know.

Sometimes I make font flash cards from the fonts I have that I can’t easily identify, along with some samples from web sites. Or I’ll just cut out magazine text/ads with fonts I don’t easily know. Then I sit down and begin the drill of running through them and trying to ID them.

It may sound a little sad and amusing I admit, but in the long run the process has paid back in several ways.

Flash cards. Brilliant idea, that.