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Essential Type: An Illustrated Guide to Understanding and Using Fonts

Tony Seddon

3.20 · Rating details · 10 ratings · 4 reviews

A comprehensive and beautifully illustrated guide to fonts, essential for anyone who engages with type in their daily lives

Have you ever wondered which typeface is used for airport signs? Or about the history behind the Times New Roman font? We are constantly engaging with type, yet many of us struggle to use it effectively or simply to understand the basics. This beautif ...more

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Hardcover, 192 pages

Published August 16th 2016 by Yale University Press

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Oct 04, 2020 H James rated it did not like it

Shelves: type-typesetting

Essential Type comprises two parts of roughly equal proportion: a glossary of type-related terms and a specimen book of forty or so typefaces. The specimen book is reasonably successful, with the typefaces well selected to evenly pepper the spectrum of serif, sans serif, slab serif, script, and other styles. Faces are presented at multiples sizes and weights, and interesting features are noted. There’s a focus on identification that doesn’t strike me as particularly useful to most readers, but i Essential Type comprises two parts of roughly equal proportion: a glossary of type-related terms and a specimen book of forty or so typefaces. The specimen book is reasonably successful, with the typefaces well selected to evenly pepper the spectrum of serif, sans serif, slab serif, script, and other styles. Faces are presented at multiples sizes and weights, and interesting features are noted. There’s a focus on identification that doesn’t strike me as particularly useful to most readers, but it’s at least a consistent approach.

The glossary is far harder to find merit in. It is divided into three color‐coded sections (“type anatomy”, “glyphs”, and “type terms”), but a disturbing number of terms are miscategorized, wrongly combined, or gratuitously separated. (The entry for ‘glyph’ is found in the ‘glyphs’ section despite the tautological impossibility of a glyph being a subset of glyphs and also wrongly combined with ‘sort’ despite fundamental differences in the two words’ meanings). Each term is given precisely half a page with one paragraph and one illustration—no exceptions. A term like ‘eye’ (a colloquialism for the counter of a lowercase e) needs about nine words; a term like ‘optical sizes’ is rich enough to fill a book and needs at least a page; but both are given one paragraph and one illustration. For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why Mr Seddon opted for such rigidity when it obviously forced him work much harder and accomplish much less. Then I paged back to the table of contents, which includes a thumbnail of every image. It is absolutely beautiful. It’s a table of contents worthy of being a dorm-room poster. And it works only because of the one-term, one-illustration rigidity of the book. In an instant I understood that the whole book was designed to make a pretty table of contents, and logic, emphasis, and even correctness had been made subservient.

The hubris of this prioritization, though, is not driving my 1-star review of Essential Type. No: my disdain for this work owes to the prevalence of misinformation. Some statements are more misleading than truly wrong (Mr Seddon presents hyphens as short dashes, when they are usually thicker, sometimes modulated, and occasionally canted). Some statements are wrong but forgivable (the PostScript–OpenType relationship is hard to understand much less summarize). But some statements are wrong and clearly due to a total failure to consult primary resources. The entry for ‘vertex’ was the one that put me over the edge: I was immediately dubious when Mr Seddon defined it as a lower intersection in a V, W, v, or w (i.e., the opposite of an ‘apex’) because for the past 400 years, ‘vertex’ has meant either a corner (regardless of orientation) or a high place. I sympathize with wordsmiths wanting a yin to ‘apex’s yang (especially when ‘zenith’ and ‘nadir’ sound so sexy together). ‘Vertex’ ain’t it, though. But for 10 years and 3 weeks starting in September 2010, Wikipedia featured the unsourced statement that the bottom of a v was called a ‘vertex’. And now a book published by Yale University Press says so too. ...more

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Sep 20, 2017 Roberto rated it liked it

Shelves: graphic-design, non-fiction, typography

This book succeeds as an “illustrated guide to understanding” typography terms, anatomy, history, classification and a limited reference to well known and used fonts. Well illustrated, although repetitive at times, this book is basically another list of terms and notions, not unlike most books on type out there. Hopefully next edition will correct a glaring mistake on page 144, the text describing The Carpenter font family was replaced by a duplicated text describing Akzidenz-Grotesk, that's a m ...more

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