Font Funk

You know, I'm not real happy with the minimal selection of fonts that Blogger provides. I've been mostly going with Arial with the occasional lapse, through carelessness, into Times New Roman which seems to be the default setting. I guess that one way around the problem is to write every post in my preferred writing tool, an open source program called OpenOffice. With OpenOffice, for work I intend to print out to get an idea of how stands up on the page, I generally use Verdana, but I find that on the screen it seems clumsy, sprawling, even strangely aggressive to the eye. For the same reason, I'm sure you will never find me using Courier New here. How about Calisto MT, Lucida Console or Tahoma, you ask? No. No. No.

I've written the majority of this post in a font called Abadi MT Condensed Light which seems to have the clean look I want, though I wonder if, in the end, it is not too crowded, too cramped to truly satisfy me. I may consider going with News Gothic MT, though again it seems to sprawl a bit. Maybe, to find the best font for this blog, I should talk to someone who has a firm grasp on and a trained eye for font variations and sizes. Someone like Christine Trainor of Hazeltree Press and Paper. Someone who, besides painting the most hauntingly beautiful winter landscapes I've had the pleasure to stare into (sadly, that link [the images are clickable] is unable to show their full power), has an extensive and expert background in bookbinding, papermaking, printmaking and letterpress.

I think that, whether or not we are always conscious of it, the right font adds an important dimension to our reading experiences. And, of course, the wrong font can detract significantly from those experiences.

Technorati Tags: fonts, letterpress, Christine Trainor, bookbinding, papermaking, printmaking, winter landscapes