While it's good that type has publicity, I find the tag which accompanies the slide-show to be highly offensive--"The Amateurs Are Coming".

I'm not an amateur, and neither are the majority of regulars here at Typophile. And most of the designers (if not all of them) featured in the slide-show are certainly not amateurs.

We are men and women who know and love type; as such, we are the only body of individuals qualified to make the type that will be used by such organizations as the New York Times--foolish and uninformed a publication as it sometimes proves itself to be.

I think the strict definition of "amateur" is in contrast to "professional", meaning it has to do with making money. So I was a professional font designer at 13 (when I sold my Arabic bitmap fonts for the C64) but some people will persist in calling me "amateur". Mostly the terms have no objective meaning - they're simply used by insecure people to make themselves feel better by striking others down.

hhp

Well, if professional means academically educated in the specifics of a given field, then I'm not a type designer. The important thing here is that I really don't believe one requires "academic" training in order to be a professional.

My introduction to type design is far from the halls of "Any-art-school, U.S.A." I came to this profession from the sickeningly pedantic field of hardcore lexicography (having an intense interest in orthographic design and reform--later the art of the alphabet and its many potential incarnations took lead over the academic linguistics I had begun with).

What's the point? You don't need the schooling; you do need to have enough passion to motivate yourself to actually learn something instead of assuming that a copy of Fontographer makes a you a pro.

Anyway, I'd like to see the look on the face of the fool who tagged the online version of that article if they were ever to see how difficult it is to design a real typeface.

Well, if you are ever at home, stop by and have a drink at one of the HfG Offenbach Typo-Stammtische (in Frankfurt

This story shows computers make "professional" a distinction without a difference when the standards for producing a font are low compared to pre-computer or as early as mid-1990's.

If I do a search on the web for fonts I get the cheap free fonts and I get calssics provided by Adobe. Who defines what is a real professional font? The search engines and whoever downloads and uses it (defines what is professional), not a trained typographer.