Baskerfield Italic

Archer Hairline.

You can click the list of 16 typefaces at the end.

Corbusier Stencil

I really dig this font!

---------------------------------

patrick carter design

Dot Matrix for me:}... odd... I feel more like Sabon Italic:}...

Inland Gothic Number 8.

So there are 16 types of people?
Vignelli × 3 is still equal to zero.

hhp

I am Plastica. And I wasn't jealous until I saw that John was Perpetua Titling. :^/

Cooper Black italic. A suprise, but it fits. In many very spooky ways.

I was Plastica too. But I think it's more about meyers-briggs or something than type.

I'm that crazy-ass dot matrix font too.

uh, yeah.

You have to tell it who you are, then type the password, Chris.

I'm Marina Script. How did it know?

Indeed he was. He ended up hanging himself. The day I was born.

hhp

Yes, he hanged himself because a German foundry rejected one of his progressive font designs. There's a great biography of him written by his son, Henri Mouron. I haven't read the whole thing, but from what I remember it's a bit apologetic at least when it comes to his type design efforts, which would be a shame.

BTW, my favorite quotes of his:
- "The poster is to art what rape is to love."
- "The quattrocento was the painter's century par excellence; our century is probably the sandwich man's."

> he died the day you were born??

In fact potentially with an hour or two. What's extra spooky is that he was intent on reforming the Latin alphabet, as am I. An inconvenient difference however is that he was actually talented!

hhp

The best place to read about my Alphabet Reform work is my essay "Improving the Tool", in Gunnar Swanson's "Graphic Design & Reading" (2000). There's a quarter-length version in Spanish and English in issue #54 of Tipografica magazine:
http://www.tipografica.com/54/?id=4

There is however a big caveat: Although the motivation and fundamental logic remain from that early effort, I have since realized something crucial that largely invalidates those results: letterform skeletons hold us away from optimal text face design; we must instead work "liminally" - designing the border between black and white.

Hanging: I'm too full of myself for that.

hhp

For those who might be interested, the (Toronto) Globe and Mail had an article about the Pentagram site, and mentioned Typophile in it. Called us type nerds, or something.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/meet-your-match---typographically-at...

Here is the transcript of my email conversation with John Allemang.

>> Hi Nick,
>>
>> I'm writing a short article for Saturday's paper on the link between
>> typefaces and personality types -- based on Pentagram's What Type Are
>> You?
>> quiz. Would you have a few minutes to share your thoughts on how fonts
>> link up with personality?
>>
>> All the best,
>>
>> John Allemang

> Hi John,
>
> Pentagram has picked up on the "social research app" meme and larded it
> with video and edutainment to create a viral promotion.
>
> There was a "What font are you" quiz on Facebook early last year which may
> have given Pentagram the idea:
> http://www.quibblo.com/quiz/87AyPEY/What-Font-Are-You
> Or this:
> http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/what-font-are-you
> Ot this:
> http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/helvetica/quiz.html
> Or this:
> http://dev.typophile.com/node/5443
> Or this:
> http://blog.extensis.com/typecaster/
> &c. &c.
>
> Trite amusement.
>
> **
>
> I don't believe in government by opinion poll.
> I don't believe in product development by market research.
> I don't believe in examination by multiple choice.
> I don't believe in categorizing people, therefore I don't believe in
> personality types. Only behaviour.
> I believe in creating typefaces that resist categorization.
>
> A font is a tool that may be used to create many effects. The blackletter
> style, for instance, is good for ecclesiastical work, alternatively hip
> hop and heavy metal tattoos.
> Fonts are like actors. Some can play many different parts, others always
> play themselves.
> Fonts are like musical instruments. Some, like the french horn, have
> little range. Others, like the piano, huge.
> Fonts are only superficially like anything else.
>
> If graphology is a pseudoscience, how much less meaningful that makes the
> correspondence between typeface and personality type.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Nick Shinn

> I'm assuming the responses in the typophile link below are all deeply
> tongue in cheek -- you're playing this game, however cleverly, just to
> mock the stupidity of it?

- John

That thread wasn't a multiple-choice "what (personality/font) type are
you" game.
It was more about physical appearance than personality.

Humour, certainly, but not mockery. It was an invitation by David
Goldstein to banter about which fonts one might find sexually attractive,
if one caricatured oneself as a typeface.

I suggested that I was the auto-erotic Thesis, a typeface with both serif
and sans serif varieties--riffing on the previous poster's mention of Gill
Sans' attraction to Perpetua, which is to all intents and purposes "Gill
Serif", both designed by the sexually notorious Eric Gill.

When Andy Clymer said, "I'm Akzidenz Grotesk, only more optimistic," well,
that wasn't about anything other than the horrific name of that particular
typeface.

So I don't think that thread addressed the issue of whether personality
type/typeface correspondence is stupid or not. There are no doubt other
Typophile threads which do, but searching Typophile archives is difficult.

_Nick

***

I would imagine that Mr Allemang's article was also edited, and that a third party wrote the headline and deck.

Although I think this stuff is trivial and the topic worthy of more than "a few minutes to share your thoughts", I feel obliged to participate from a business perspective, to keep myself in the public eye and on the usual suspects list when it comes to type design commissions. So I am slightly peeved that after spending quite a few minutes corresponding with Mr Allemang, I was mentioned as a "designer", not a type designer, and that the word "designing" was removed from my statement "I believe in designing typefaces that defy categorization", without, even, the substitution of an ellipsis.