There are a lot of fonts out there today. Changes in technology and the subsequent ease with which folks can now make new typefaces has led to a font explosion. And as more people find out how easy they are to make (you can learn how to make one in an upcoming column), the number of would-be font designers continues to grow. But I don't think the ease of technology is solely responsible for the font boom. I think the main reason people want new fonts nowadays can be summed up in two words:
RONALD REAGAN
It was under this former President's reign that America had another kind of boom in the '80s.... the mini-mall!
During the Reagan era, a new mini-mall was popping up in America at a rate of about one every three minutes. With these suburban, consumer-based, roadside attractions appearing at such a rapid clip, production was quick, cheap and sloppy. Nobody cared about style. The mini-mall was too convenient. If you could go to one strip mall and take care of your film processing, your dry-cleaning and pick up a movie from a mom-and-pop video store while only having to find one parking place, why would you care if there was attractive signage?
Every single sign for every single shop in these horrendous little Reaganite temples was set in Helvetica Oblique. It's not even a true italic fer chrissakes! It's a pretty ugly font to start with, and the fact that 90% of all Americans lived within two miles of such a shoddily-signed mini-mall only made matters worse. Twelve years (Bush, Reagan, same thing) later, this simpleton-istic typographic abuse has led to rebellion. That's why there are so many fonts out there now. Cuz we're mad as hell at looking at Helvetica Oblique and we're not gonna take it anymore.
I, myself, started making fonts when I was a suburban punk teenager in Tampa, Florida, in the mid-'80s. I made flyers for shows by bands like Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, the Dead Kennedys, Seven Seconds, etc. I think of the lettering on these flyers as fonts cuz they're no different than what I'm doing today. Back then, we didn't have these fancy COMPUTERS to make fonts with. All I had was a pen and some paper. Mostly I stuck to hand-lettering. I'd spend all day just drawing four or five words.
Sometimes I used those rub-on dry transfers for dates and times, but the stuff would always peel off and crack. I thought it looked terrible. Little did I know that grunge typography would come along in the next decade and make that look fashionable. My teen inadequacies became the trademark of my grown-up years.
I didn't really know anything about fonts until around 1990, when I started sneaking into Kinko's to work on their Macs after midnight while my friends were working. Having come from a college that had nothing but PCs everywhere, I knew nothing about the Macintosh. But I learned fast, and after about six months I learned how to install new fonts into the computer. This led to font bingeing. My friend who showed me how to use fonts had just gotten his first job at a real design firm. He had access to almost all of their fonts and stole them for his computer at home. I shit my pants when I went over to his house one day and found out he had two 44 meg SyQuest cartridges FULL of fonts, and I got to steal 'em all. With such humble beginnings, it's kinda hard for me to be upset when I find out somebody's using my font without paying for it.
Until you've got a portly body of work, like say 50 fonts, the money you'll receive from fontmaking is pretty dinky. The most rewarding part of designing fonts is seeing other people use them, whether they pay for 'em or not. It's picking up a magazine, flipping through it and finding something that you created being used in a way that you had never thought of. It's going into a record store and finding your font on the cover of a CD by a band that you like. (The latest and most impressive cover I've got is Emancipation, the brand new 3-CD set from The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, or whatever he's calling himself nowadays [he calls himself "The Artist" now -- ed.], although musically I prefer the Funky Porcini acid-illbient-jazz CD from the British Ninjatoon label.) It's seeing your fonts in the credits at the Sundance Film Festival -- I designed film credits for punk rock filmmaker Sarah Jacobson's "Mary Jane's Not a Virgin Anymore," which just got accepted there.
Speaking of mini-malls and movies, did you know that Blockbuster won't carry Cheech and Chong movies because they don't encourage proper American family values? And that sometimes movie companies will edit their films when they're released on video just to make Blockbuster happy? Don't even get me started on these pirates...
Blockbuster is a tool of Satan. Ronald Reagan was evil. I hate Helvetica Oblique.
That's why I make fonts.
So there.
