On Fonts...

 Who knows what a "font" is? I'm sure I could not give you an accurate definition without referring to a dictionary. As a sign painter, a remark that I hear often is "you must know a lot of fonts." Hearing this causes me to picture an endless list of options on a drop-down menu in Microsoft Word. I don't know a lot of these fonts.  If someone held a gun to my head I could rattle off the names of maybe a dozen. In the LA Trade Tech Sign Graphics program the term 'font' was never uttered. What we learned were called alphabets, three of them to be exact. There is Gothic, Roman, and Casual. Script could be considered an alphabet but we were taught to NEVER EVER use script. There are some other types of alphabets too; Text is what we learned to call what most people recognize as Old English - to be used sparingly and usually in instances where antiques are involved. Then there are novelty alphabets which range from the hokey "takeout menu" lettering designed to mimic traditional brush script from Asia to letters built from any representational object, dildos for example. The possibilities are virtually infinite for novelty alphabets and they all range from cringe to downright atrocious. The point is, an alphabet refers to a family of lettering that has certain distinct properties which can be then altered to suit the specific style and whims of the craftsperson using it. 

Often a client will send me something they call a 'style guide'. This is helpful because it tells me what their logo looks like and gives me a huge list of  DONT'S in regard to how to present their logo to the public. It also gives me very specific numbers that refer to the hues and tones in which their logo is to be rendered called Pantone numbers. Most importantly a style guide will tell me what font (or fonts) may be used to represent their brand. This is one instance where I use fonts. This information forces me to take a specific choice from the dropdown menu and use it for the entirety of the client's sign. 

Alternately, when we sketch something custom for a client, we do not look at a dropdown menu. We pick an alphabet based on the context and audience the sign is intended for. Then we draw it. We make it look unified and may add certain embellishments, or ligatures, that we've have never used before, simply because our eye tells us they are needed. For me it is much faster than selecting a specific font and meddling with spacing and thicknesses and so forth until it looks harmonious to my eye. When I paint a sign in this way I couldn't tell you what the font is because it isn't a font. It's derived from a general alphabet, sure, it might be a gothic or a roman alphabet. But one could not find this specific lettering if they painstakingly searched ever dropdown menu of every word processing software in the world. 

You might be saying, "Ok, this guy thinks he's too good for fonts." Not so. I love fonts. I use them all the time, often multiple fonts for the same word! I have yet to find the perfect font. I can draw the perfect lettering every time.. But when it comes time to make a pattern for a large wall sign and I don't have the time to measure and draw each letter with a pencil and yardstick I go to the font menu; I take an E from this font, a C from that font, can't use the M because it's an upside-down W so I take an M from another font and the rest of the letters from one of those three and then I adjust the spacing (computers call it kerning) and I move the nodes so that the N isn't too wide and so the curves extend slightly beyond the guideline and when it's all balanced I send it to the plotter and that sonofabitch draws it perfect! And it's not a font anymore because none of the fonts were good enough for this sign but they worked together to become something greater, something called custom lettering. No sign painter likes to hear "Wow, nice font" about something they just hand lettered. 'Font' is standard, it's encoded, anyone can select the same font and it will be the same anywhere in the universe. Nowhere in sign painting will you find two letters exactly alike. They might be close. But they ain't a font.