Font Me

Sorry I'm late posting today; my guy hurt his foot and naturally I'm the family nurse. While I'm off pampering my poor love and running him to the doctor, here's an online typography quiz you can take to find out which typeface best suits your personality.

My results:



Interesting. I would have picked something old-fashioned, like Courier New, so maybe it even fits. I just checked the blog template and I'm using Verdana for PBW's text, but I picked that because from my POV it was the easiest to read.

What typeface did you get? Let us know in comments.

(Online quiz link swiped from Gerard over at the Presurfer)

Ink Saver

As a science fair project, 14-year-old middle school student Suvir Mirchandani discovered that switching to Garamond as the typeface font for printed documents could save thousands in the cost of ink -- and on a larger scale, millions:

"Ink is two times more expensive than French perfume by volume," Suvir says with a chuckle. He's right: Chanel No. 5 perfume costs $38 per ounce, while the equivalent amount of Hewlett-Packard printer ink can cost up to $75.

The young teen theorized that his school district could save as much as $21,000.00 by switching to the thinner Garamond, which uses less ink, and went to do the same math for the federal goverment:

Using the General Services Administration's estimated annual cost of ink -- $467 million -- Suvir concluded that if the federal government used Garamond exclusively it could save nearly 30% -- or $136 million per year. An additional $234 million could be saved annually if state governments also jumped on board, he reported.

So will everyone switch over to Garamond to save all that expensive ink? Probably not -- but I can tell you from now on I'll be using it instead of Times New Roman or Arial for what I print out.

Related links: Make your own fonts for free with Fonstruct

Free Your Fonts

Please note as of 01/15/14: Google has been giving Urban Fonts's web master some unnecessary grief over the links in this post, all of which I personally researched and placed. To help him out I am deleting all of the links embedded in this post, so as of now none of them will work where mentioned. The text of the original post, however, with all the links intact, can still be found here over on my Google Docs Library at this URL:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzylBQC3SyqoZ21KbXN5MFdCMXM/edit?usp=sharing

UrbanFonts.com touts its collection of over 8,000 freeware fonts as amazing, so while looking for a promo style for Disenchanted & Company I decided to test drive an install and see how it worked. First I found a font in the free section that I thought was unusual and exceptional, Celtasmigoria by Sorcerer (to get a better view, click on the image to go to the site page for this font):



I clicked download, and the following screen came up:



From there I clicked Install, and like magic the font was added to my system, which allowed me to select and type with it in Word:



While it doesn't really suit my D&C project, this particular font would work as inspiration for a Celtic embroidery project a friend of mine is working on; the pictoral art of the capital letters is perfect for her needlework. I imagine you indie authors and webmasters can probably find some neat free fonts at this site to use in your cover art and site designs. Note: if you do want to use any free font for a commercial project you should always a) let the font designer know first and b) give the designer proper credit and linkage.

Here are links to other free fonts at the site that I've used or thought were very cool:

A Lolita Scorned
a picture alphabet
Anarchistic
And then some
ARDENWOOD
bulky Refuse
Chicory
FLORALIS
Freebooter
Mael
Old Copperfield
Sanford Book
WildWood
Ytaghan

Opinions Wanted

These are fonts I'm considering for use with promotional materials for Disenchanted & Company, my new urban fantasy series for Pocket Star. I've whittled down a long list of possibilities to these, but I can't make up my mind which is the most attractive/appealing of the final five.

Which one do you like best? Please vote by number in comments.

Font Ten

Ten Things About Fonts
(Inspired by this article over at Cracked.com)

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

Download 17 different handwriting fonts here.

For those who want to create their own typeface, check out Chank's online tutorial guide to How to Make Your Own Fonts.

Chank also has a video on YouTube here showing a live workshop on making a font with M&Ms.

Laura McCanna's page with tips on How to Create a Typeface.

NexusFont is "a font manager for Windows. If you have many fonts and you need to choose fonts you want, this program is for you. You can compare many fonts at once. And there are useful functions to manage font files" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7)

Paleofonts is "an *exe file of c. 12 Mb which is unpacked by default in a separate folder, of c. 38 Mb, from where it can be installed into "Windows"´s " Fonts " folder. With additional software and separate procedures, the True TypeFonts may work under some " Linux " distributions. The compilation contains 279 paleographic True Type Files plus a brief * pdf document entitled "Explanation", providing some technical and legal statements. The fonts are designed by various authors, whose intellectual property they represent. The credit for the creation of these fonts is all theirs. All of the fonts are free for personal as well as academic use, but not for commercial purposes such as reselling, charging for use, hiring. The fonts embody dozens of ancient scripts that have been (and in some instances few of them are still being used) for millennia around the Mediterranean sea, as well as Northern, Central and Eastern parts of Europe, ancient Egypt and Near and Middle East. Some of these scripts are scarcely represented in this version, rarely with more than one font, but many, among them various variants of Egyptian hieroglyphs Hebrew, Greek, Latin as well as OCS Cyrillic are quite extensively represented" (OS: Win 98/ME/2000/XP)

Rockin Text is "a very simple yet powerful software designed to make quick text graphics. It provides various features which make it an extremely handy tool for web designers or anyone who needs to design text graphics" (OS: Win 98/ME/NT/2K/XP/2003)

Did you know there was a convention every year for the typographically obsessed? Yep. Registration is now open for TypeCon 2010.

Typographica, edited by Stephen Coles, is "a review of typefaces and type books, with occasional commentary on fonts and typographic design."

Have you seen a font out there and want to know what it is? Upload it to What the Font to find the closest match in their database.