(The "certain amount" involves knowing that some fonts are serif and
some sans, but I've never heard of some of those fonts before. I think
I shall look up Rosewood and see if I like it.)

I'll try again tomorrow when the examples aren't fresh in my mind.

Still. 22. TWENTY TWO. I didn't think I had it in me.

I guess I lost my Font Snob certification today.

It does help that we use a lot of fonts for the buttons, stickers, and shirts. Especially the buttons...

John D. Berry would get them all the first time around. My in-laws probably would too.

But Optima is one of the first two fonts I fell in love with, about
twenty years ago. Sleek, subtle, a lot like a serif font except -- not.
Teresa -- what the heck do you mean, it looks Mormon?

I got 5 out of the first 8, then stopped. No way should my score be that high from so much guesswork!

I am pretty good at "who painted the cover of this SF novel?" but fonts are not my strong suit.

I am ashamed though, I mixed up helvetica and arial.

Oh the shame.

Interesting game - like some of the other posters, I want to know the right answers to some of the ones I got wrong!

14? You complain at 14? You are a font of wisdom at 14. A veritable
safont. Me, I tried more than once, and, well, let's just say my scores
have been weighted and have been font wanting.

(14.)

But it's a cool game!

But I'm comfortable with that fact.

i... like looking at fonts, & am an extremely amateur print
designer* (i.e. self-publish my comic books), but nothing like a maven.
my score pleases me ok.

*so i knew the ones i use, like optima, & the ones i'll never
use again, like comic sans. too bad they didn't have myriad, i font i'm
sure i like mostly because i like my own name so much.

Cue Vincent Price laughter.

Thank you for a day laid to waste!

Monaco too, but that's mostly because I use that in my code editor.

However there was one I loved, and I got it wrong, and didn't find
out till too late that what I should have done was send a screenshot to
the author, nor did it occur to me that I could have googled.

It isn't Bodoni or Optima, the two fonts that have gotten love so far.

It had thicks and thins (what's the opposite of monoline?). There
was a lot of space between the letters. The 'e' was very round and the
loose end came to a point. What might it have been?

I love Optima. I don't care where it's been or what it's done. If I
had to spend the rest of my life using only a half-dozen typefaces, it
would be one of them.

Nancy Lebovitz (53), do you know from Identifont? Good for figuring out which font you're thinking of. Notice also that they'll turn your handwriting into a typeface.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden @ 58:

I love Optima. I don't care where it's been or what it's done. If I
had to spend the rest of my life using only a half-dozen typefaces, it
would be one of them.

Me, too. (Though I'd never have associated it with things Mormon...) I remember reading John M. Ford's Growing Up Weightless in trade paperback version, and loving the fact that it was set in Optima.

(There's an argument to the effect that long text should not be set
in something sufficiently notable or idiosyncratic that the reader notices
the typeface. In this particular case, at least, I didn't care; if
anything, the presence of Optima added an extra frisson to the
aesthetic experience of reading an already wonderful story.)

Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a font I used to like, but can't
remember the name. IIRC, it was standard to MS-Word 7, and was rather
art nouveau-ish, possibly cursive. Does this ring any bells with anyone?

ps: When I see "Moderator" and "Teresa" in close proximity, the
first thing my brain tells me is "Mother Teresa." Perhaps that should
be "Den Mother."

I think I'll try it again, though.

Victoria

(Nancy, is it Benguiat you were thinking of?)

It's a relatively tough test. An easier one would have you
identifying more disparate fonts (University Roman, Lincoln Log,
Poptics, Grotesque Extra-Ugly, Venusian). A fun one would be to hand
the test-taker a list of typefaces and have them put them in order by
date at which they would have been fashionable to use on a non-ironic
non-retro magazine logo or restaurant sign: Acadian, Korinna, Broadway,
Murray Hill, Avant-Garde, Arnold Bocklin, Peignot Bold, Friz Quadrata,
Lubalin Graph, Lithos ...

(Nancy, is it Benguiat you were thinking of?)

It's a relatively tough test. An easier one would have you
identifying more disparate fonts (University Roman, Lincoln Log,
Poptics, Grotesque Extra-Ugly, Venusian). A fun one would be to hand
the test-taker a list of typefaces and have them put them in order by
date at which they would have been fashionable to use on a non-ironic
non-retro magazine logo or restaurant sign: Acadian, Korinna, Broadway,
Murray Hill, Avant-Garde, Arnold Bocklin, Peignot Bold, Friz Quadrata,
Lubalin Graph, Lithos ...

The one ending with 'BB': modern art calligraphic.

Pretty please?

Unfortunately, Identifont don't ask "Is it smackdab in the middle of what you feel letter forms should be?"

I don't think it's Benguiat, either, though that one's got the right
weight. Is weight the right word for ratio of thickness of major
strokes to the heights of the letters?

Benguiat is quirky. What I loved about that font was that it
was lively but totally classical. It had no quirk. Or at least no quirk
that I remember. Unfortunately, what I remember is my emotional
reaction, a blurry overview, some of the 'e', and the useless fact that
the words were 'stumbleupon'. Possibly 'stumbleupon.com'.

As an example of the quirk issue, the 'e' I remember has a pointed
open end, but Benguiat has a serif on the 'e'. One more thing about the
'e'-- it was very circular rather than oval.

While we're talking fonts, can anyone recommend a good historical majority Italic font?

What I mean is that the default modern italic is imho a miserable thing, too light-weight
or crowded or with excessive serifs or something to be fit for body
text, even though people sometimes use it for prefaces. Mercifully,
long-form italic seems to have gotten rarer.

Modern italic fonts are based on historic calligraphy, but it was a
hand that wasn't nearly as common (at least to judge by what gets into
calligraphy books) as something a little heavier, straighter, and more
legible.

The second type example is what I mean by default modern italic.

Here's
a pretty good example, if a little crowded, of what I mean by the more
common historical italic. I wasn't able to find an actual historical
example online.

Which Benguiat? There's more than one.

(I'd go off to another place, such as Fontage.com, and look at them,
but I'm supposed to be working. Identifont is nice, but you have to
have samples in front of you to go through the process.)

No, it wasn't on the test. But it is an Open Type font, which means you can stick it in PDFs without purchasing it separately.

There are plenty of free Open Type fonts out there, but there are
also a lot of commercial ones from big-name font foundries. Adobe has
converted its entire type library to Open Type -- and they do expect
you to purchase those. (Though a subset of the library does come
bundled with their Creative Suite.)

I've never been confirmed, and the last church I've set foot in was
almost certainly Presbyterian. I might have been inside a synagogue
more recently than a Catholic church. (Church basements are another story -- I help my mother sell stuff at flea markets from time to time.)

But nevertheless, the church I don't belong to is definitely Catholic. Folk mass and everything, they have the best music.

I knew a handful of the fonts on sight (some from work, one -
Garamond - from reading novels set in it and saying "That's a nice
font, what is it?"), did a lot of process of elimination ("That's not
italic! And it's certainly not Wingdings!"), and picked a few of them by clicking on the name that seemed the best match for what the font looked like.

I have met Identifont before, and have gone from enthusiasm about the
concept to weary irritation about the reality: there's a shortcut in
the implementation that makes it possible for the system to confidently
produce a "match" that conspicuously fails to correspond to the input
you gave (for instance, you're looking for a font where the 3 has a
flat top, and tell it so when it asks, and it still gives you a font
where the 3 has a rounded top). I understand how this happens, but that
doesn't stop it being annoying, especially when it happens to one
several times in a row.

Not TOO bad, some were much easier than others, but on the whole, I guess I was more lucky than anything else.

I knew the difference between Garamond and Caslon because in
February I typeset a catalog for a very small nonprofit using Adobe
Garamond Pro (and had to decide whether to use that or Ad. Caslon Pro
-- a decision which is about as boring as it sounds). I though of doing
the whole thing in something like Perpetua or Trajan but opted not to
on grounds of legibility and that it would be too cutesy by half.

Teresa, when you say that Optima "Feels Mormon," what do you mean by that?

Lordy, I am so not going over to try that, I can tell things are different sometimes, but remembering which is which name, nah.

In fact, when I saw Palatino and Optima, I thought of Hermann Zapf, who designed them both.

I never think of Mormons and Optima; I think of really crappy
tightly kerned mid-1970s everything newslettery with Optima. Then I
read Friedrich Neugebauer's The Mystic Art of Written Forms
and saw how beautiful Optima could be as a text font. The not-quite
sans serif boot-leg cut of the strokes makes it easier to read that
uniformly sans serif. If you set your letter tracking a little wider
than standard (but not by much), Optima is drop-dead gorgeous.

I just went to the web site for The Vietnam War Memorial Wall, and yes, the names are all set in Optima. capitals. Just found, at the bottom of this page, the last question in the FAQ confirms that it's Optima.

. . . .

Not that long ago, I spent a goodly amount of time trying to match a
font. San serif. Bold. It wasn't Helvetica. It was not Frutiger. It was
not Univers. I went to Identifont -- or some other site I'm too lazy to
look up at the moment -- where I answered a series of questions about
parts of letters, and in the end it announced that it was Arial / Arial
Black, and I gnashed and growled. So. obvious. in. retrospect.

What a lovely thread. This kind of arcane typographic knowledge is a light I usually put under a bushel. It's fun to bring it out from time to time.

We get a lot of junk faxes where I work, the kind with eight or nine faces used on one page. That's another kind of ouch.

My favorite font is Palatino, although I am not sure why.

I've had an aversion to it for several years, due partly, I think,
to the number of copies of it floating around. The rest is probably due
to misuse, if not overuse. (There are so many handsome fonts out there:
why do so many people use the same three or four (usually ugly) ones?)

At some point, I may actually get a count on how many times I've seen Peignot under one or another name.

Ye ghods. Arcane and poetic font neepery. I am truly awestruck.