Apart from getting hooked on journalism when I started volunteering at The Muse, Memorial's student newspaper, I got hooked on a sub-sub-sub-specialty: typefaces. I started at a time when the paper still sent out all of its copy, headlines, cutlines - the works - to be set by an outside company. When the paper got its own typesetting machine at the end of 1982, it was a revelation to see how changing a font changed the meaning of, say, a feature headline.
It's hard to express to people today how much effort it took years ago to get a wide range of fonts. Today, you can get hundreds of fonts with thousands of variations with common word processing packages, and even more are easily downloaded. I almost keeled over a few weeks ago when my son, while working on a school project, told me we needed to download "the Star Wars font" for his poster. (It turned out to be easy to find.)
Fonts come and go, but good old Helvetica is a standby, which is why the T-shirt seen above (found here) is appealing.
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