The book begins with a fun forward by Chip Kidd who explains his love of fonts beginning in his childhood with the bible in church and the different typefaces found in 70s television shows and rockband album titles. It also has a super funny comic about (ironically) Comic Sans..
Anyway, in the introduction of Just My Type, titled Love Letters, Garfield starts with a description about a man who never graduated from college and decided to take a calligraphy course and ended up finding his passion for fonts.This man is revealed to be Steve Jobs (sadly I read this days before his death) and how his love of letters is found throughout the Macintosh brand. Its discussed that Jobs introduced the fonts Chicago and Toronto to be as beautiful as calligraphy and original as the cities for which they are named.
One of my favorite parts of this chapter was when Garfield makes the point about how fonts have been around forever, so how are we still improving them?
He writes: "Typefaces are now 560 years old. So when a Brit called Matthew Carter constructed Verdana and Georgia for the digital age in the 1990s, what could he possibly have been doing to an A and a B that had never been done before?"
This quote got me thinking and made me want to learn and research even more about the characteristics that are found in fonts today that were found in fonts long ago in the beginning.
He also makes a great point about how an American friend of Carter created Gotham, which is the font that helped to bring Barack Obama into the White House.
He then asks:
"What makes a font presidential or American, or British, French, German, Swiss, or Jewish? These are arcane mysteries, and it is the job of this book to get to the heart of them."
Garfield states at the end of Love Letters that the purpose of his book is to extend awareness and to celebrate our relationship with letters, the relationship that most of us don't realize existed.
I think this book was written for my geekness..
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