Almost as exciting as QC

Quirky serifs aside, Georgia fonts win on Web
By Alice Rawsthorn International Herald Tribune
SUNDAY, JULY 9, 2006

Log on to The New York Times's Web site, and you'll see it there. Just as you'll spot it on the Web sites of London's Frieze Art Fair, the architecture magazine Metropolis, the artist Damien Hirst, and on blog, after blog, after blog.

All of these Web sites use the same typeface - Georgia. Typefaces slip in and out of fashion like every other area of design, but right now Georgia is the most fashionable one on the Internet. "A few designers have mentioned that there seems to be a 'Georgia revival' going on," says Matthew Carter, the British-born, Boston-based designer who developed Georgia for Microsoft in 1996. "It seems a bit young to have died and been revived already."

Whatever its age, Georgia is an elegant, quietly idiosyncratic typeface, which is a pleasure to read on screen, even though it is not designed in the minimalist style of lettering that we associate with the Internet. Instead it is one of the serif fonts with decorative squiggles at the ends of the characters that we are accustomed to seeing in print. Georgia's growing popularity is partly the product of typographic fashion, but also reflects deeper changes in our relationship with the screen as our primary source of information.

Before the digital era, typography was an obscure, though highly skilled craft in which letter shapes were literally carved out of metal. This was how Carter, now 68, trained in the 1950s when he gave up a place at Oxford University for an internship at a traditional Dutch type foundry. The development process was so time-consuming that new typefaces were relatively rare. Many of the most commonly used ones were centuries-old, such as Bodoni and Baskerville, both designed in the 1700s. Even supposedly modern fonts dated back decades, like Times New Roman of 1931 and the popular sans serif typeface (that's one without squiggles), Helvetica of 1951.

All this changed in the 1980s when computers became cheaper...

...and then the online edition of the International Herald Tribune robs us of the ending of the story, which is fascinating. But at least you get a taste... :D