Ø Å Æ

Last summer right after my car broke, I started taking a class about typography. Letterforms and kerning and leading, oh my! I had never in my entire life thought about type-faces in such a complex way. I had never even considered that someone spent months if not years creating fonts as a career.

What is so important about different fonts? Many people take for granted that before computers had thousands of different vector based fonts to choose from, printers [yes the human kind] used varying sized metal letters to manually create sentences which were then stamped onto paper. This process of "typing" took skilled type-setters [yes people again - with their hands] a lot of time to set.

I recently downloaded some new fonts from dafont.com, a website full of type-faces which are free to download and use for personal use. One font I particularly like (above) is called "Wired". It is a simple sans serif font which has been transformed into a sans serif wired font. It's as if the font was sculpted from barbed wires.

Although the font is new and interesting, it comes with certain downfalls, for example, the character choices are very limited. It hinders me from using some of my favorite letters like æ, å, and ø, and makes it impossible to write anything that has any—special grammar markings.