“The more one thinks about what a typeface is, the less simple it becomes.”

One thing that stuck with me was when he alluded to the fact that typefaces are like people – they have faces, the faces resemble all of the faces of their family is some way – and some families are extended – they have bold, italics, mediums. And there’s different families of eras of typefaces – just like family generations – all affected by historical and cultural circumstances.

Something I didn’t know: Bold and Clarendon were synonymous years after bold typefaces had been designed.

If I understand correctly, the history of German and Swiss typefaces was such that ‘Kursiv’ typefaces were an entirely different family with a similar style. Contrasted by roman typefaces which combined italics and regular typefaces and accepted them as one.

Something that got me to think twice was when the author posed the question: What makes up the letter A? There’s no scientific rule for what makes up the letter A. Is it just recognition? But what if some people recognise it and some don’t? For instance, if the line in between the A that joins the two sides (the cross bar as I’ve learned). How much can the line shrink before it’s no longer recognizable?

Another interesting thing to think about brought up in the article was that of simplifying a typeface – at what point does it lose its originality and identity?

Again, another great point – as a designer you have to design for all mediums that the typeface might be viewed at. Something I was thinking about as I was reading this on my iPad was that the type that I’m reading through my screen has had so many layers of abstraction and digital-analog transfer, that it becomes almost disintegrated – or a new typeface altogether.

Here’s the image of what I’m, seeing on my screen, enlarged.

Consider: The typeface designer probably designed this using metal, then it was turned into a mass production printing method, printed on a printing press into the book, scanned into the printer, arranged as bits in the computer, and displayed on my high resolution iPad screen.

My interesting question: I wonder if you can put a typeface through rounds of this transfer, and come out with something that looks like an entirely different typeface. Certainly I would assume that you could distort the image through the process so much that it might look the a bolder, or lighter version of the typeface – but a new family all together is something interesting to think about.