Mark Simonson

Call me a bit utilitarian or risk averse, but to me it seems that the free fonts out there cover basically all of the use cases that I could have. Surely there are enough fonts like that to fit most of the designs that you could conceivably come up with? Or do people really look at a font that might cost thousands of USD to use, like Proxima Nova (https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/proxima-nova) and go: "Yes, this is exactly what fits my creative vision and nothing less will do!" Not that it wouldn't be worth the price tag for some, but to me that feels like something that only large enterprises for which that's a rounding error might want to do.

Years ago I fell in love with Anonymous Pro. Everything seems to fit just right. I've never had an issue wondering which character is which nor have I run into missing common characters. https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro

Any love for Anonymous Pro? https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro

Might want to add Anonymous Pro to the stable: https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro It looks a bit weird in short runs, but is great somehow when used on actual code.

Another coding font worth mentioning is Anonymous Pro http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro

Maybe, but the most popular (Proxima Nova) has roots that predate its doppelganger Gotham (H&FJ's most popular typeface) by six years: http://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/first-public-use-of-what-bec… Nevertheless, its recent popularity is due to its status as best-legal-webfont-alternative to Gotham - at least, until today.

A free, simple one I like: https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro (also available from Google and Adobe). I have long hesitated to pay for fonts for personal, non commercial use. However a well designed font really can make a difference in the usability of a computer. I'm checking these out, I'm at the point where I would be willing to spend some serious cash for a font. Although to me, "serious cash" for a personal use item would be around $25, some of these cost upwards of $100. Part of my hesitation is a lack of understanding how to analyze fonts and my preference. I've done some reading on typography and design, but any time I install a new font, the depth of my emotion goes as far as "this is nice" or "I liked the previous font more, I guess".

That depends what the idea is. If the idea is an idea for an article for a blog that exists to showcase your business or interests, then yes, absolutely, in that case how many people are attracted to the article and learn about what you do and your skills should be a major measure of success. > If only all those people in history thought like that, we'd still be living in caves. If "all those people" through history had measured the impact of what they did and done more of what worked and less of what didn't, instead of writing things off as useless based on belief, we'd be far further ahead. In this case, what he did worked - his site specifically exists to showcase his professional skills and his work [1], and here we are discussing an article he invested time in writing 16 years ago [1] https://www.marksimonson.com/info/about

Looks like Anonymous Pro. http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro

You should definitely add Anonymous Pro to the list! http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro

a brief history of helvetica and arial, posted here a couple of weeks ago: http://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/the-scourge-of-arial

:D How about Proxima Nova? (http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/proxima-nova)

Dina used to be my go-to font as well but a few years ago I switched to Anonymous Pro [1] as it tends to be more recognizable at the small font sizes which I use. [1] http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro

I've been using Anonymous Pro[0] for as long as I've known about it. I think I think Anonymous slightly more than Hack. On a different note, while this might sound like a silly gripe, I really don't like the "r"s in Hack. They seem off. [0] http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro

I'm a huge fan of Anonymous Pro... If you want to compare with something else. http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro

For programming, I like the font Anonymous Pro[1]. 1: http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro

Anonymous Pro http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro is what I use in my terminal and editor.

That is true, here’s a fun comparison: http://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/how-to-spot-arial As you can see, all the areas in which Monotype Arial is different from Linotype Helvetica are borrowed from Monotype Grot. The reason to make such a monster is purely financial.

There is a tilde in the full sample: http://www.marksimonson.com/assets/content/fonts/AnonymousProSpecimen.…

Ugh. This is terrible. Use Anonymous or Anonymous Pro. http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro

Off-topic: do you know where a beautiful document like http://www.marksimonson.com/fontspecimens/ProximaNovaOverview.pdf is made?

Mark wrote a similarly interesting article about the typography in Mad Men a couple of years ago too. http://www.marksimonson.com/article/236/mad-men-mad-props

Didn't we already do this with desktop software and stock images ages ago? Speculatively a comment on the Adobe says that The Type Founders is private equity backed. That makes sense if they are trying to capture revenue that has been forgone out of license management difficulties. Once they prove the legalities and revenue stream, sell it to Adobe or IPO. Nobody likes to hear it, but I think there is an opportunity for blockchain here. Like any piece of software, fonts are licensed for specific uses. The kind of license you need is determined by how you will be using the fonts and what you will be using them to create. [...] A web license lets you serve the fonts on a website and use them as live, dynamic text via HTML and @font-face CSS. The cost is determined by the specific fonts licensed, the approximate number of monthly page views the websites using the fonts receive, and the length of the license in years. https://www.marksimonson.com/info/purchasing

also: https://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/1979

Increasingly, professional typeface designers working today are coders as well. The OpenType format for fonts allows designers to program font behaviour, often in pretty sophisticated ways. These range from standard typographic niceties like automatic substitution of a pre-defined sequence of glyphs with a ligature, to contextual substitutions of alternates to make a handwriting font more natural-looking, to even more creative explorations of the possibilities of the OpenType format. In addition, many designers are taking advantage of scripting to automate parts of the design process. For example, Mark Simonson, the designer of the Anonymous Pro featured here, wrote a script to help you in generating pangrams: http://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/pangrammer-helper-robofont-s… This example is only tangentially related to the typeface design process, but if you're interested about the intersection of typeface design and technology, you can look up videos from the Robothon conferences to see what the possibilities are.

For IDEs and text editors, I use Dank Mono[0] 14pt. On my personal machine, my terminal font is Cozette[1] 13pt, while on my company machine it's Dank Mono[0] 14pt. In the past I've also used SF Mono[2], Fira Code[3] and Anonymous Pro[4] among others. [0]: https://philpl.gumroad.com/l/dank-mono [1]: https://github.com/slavfox/Cozette [2]: https://developer.apple.com/fonts/ [3]: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode [4]: https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro