Ghost of typography past

Had a strange, but pleasant, experience yesterday; fighting back some nostalgia for Renate all of the sudden. Luc Devroye, a CS professor at McGill University in Montreal, wrote up a bit about my typography on his site.

The reason this is strange is I haven’t been much of a typographer in a long time. I haven’t put anything online—except as résumé points—since 1996 at the latest and I think I did most of it in 1995. He linked to one of my fonts, Element, at dafont.com. I didn’t even know it was up there. I put out about 6 of them as shareware on AOL back when they were the only game in town.

I suppose the fonts have migrated around a bit just because there weren’t that many fonts back then. Today there are 10s of thousands of free fonts or rip-offs of licensed fonts available.

I haven’t quit designing them—as you can see—but I haven’t done one digitally since 1998. Right about that time support for my favorite font editor, Fontographer, evaporated. The software was sold around a couple of times and new versions ceased just as Apple was switching OSes—again—and I was leaving the country—again.

My .fog files languished on a Mac 5300 for 8 years. Today I discover that there is a 4.7 Fontographer release which is compatible with OS X. So, looks like I’m back in the font game as soon as I cough up the $99 update fee. Of course now a new Wacom tablet is in order because of Apple’s new hardware standards and nearly total lack of support for their old stuff. Che scemo.

In any case, you can get Element by clicking on its image above and I’ll post more of my typefaces soon and see about rendering some of the new designs digitally.