Just Your Type

Joel Friedlander of The Book Designer points me toward Identifont, which he describes as “the coolest font site on the Web.”

Identifont, the brainchild of David Johnson-Davies was built around Artificial Intelligence (AI) software developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and launched in 2000. The site says it is the largest independent directory of typefaces on the internet. You can see by the updates that new type foundries are being added all the time.

Even for somebody like me, whose interest in typography now has more to do with curiosity than career commitment, Identifont has a great deal to offer. No matter that all I might want to do is learn about the history of Bembo, Sydney, or Gotham (which became part of the official typographical scheme for Barack Obama’s history-making 2008 presidential campaign). The site even offers you the chance to “turn your handwriting into a font” (which I would probably do, if my handwriting were even legible anymore).

Friedlander’s synopsis of Identifont’s attributes is here. The actual Web site can be found here.

READ MORE: “Erik Spiekermann--Putting Back the Face into Typography,” by Dan Wagstaff (The Casual Optimist).