Obviously I didn’t expect my whole, long-winded initial entry to be printed in type-for-the-blind size. Sorry about that.

I wanted to offer special thanks to Typophile Paul D. Hunt for providing some excellent script font samples for the Script Font ID Guide, mostly in Part 7 (Casual Flowing Scripts). Keeping up with scripts has been overwhelming (let’s just say impossible).

- Mike Yanega

This is the rest of my introductory post — in more readable size.

How does an Aerospace software engineer wind up being a Typophiliac? (I know Typophile is the usual term, but this makes it sound more like the disease it is.) To answer that, it helps to understand what sort of passions have always gripped me. I am a List maker; a collector, a book lover (especially reference books), and a classifier. I love identifying things. As a kid, I used to try to identify every living creature I saw, and I borrowed every nature book they had in the library. I even went through unabridged dictionaries and wrote down the names of every animal they illustrated (my first List). I eventually specialized in Fishes, and if FishBase wasn’t already there I would have loved doing that once I had time on the computer to devote to my passions. After Nature, I started cataloguing Airplanes, and did my first serious book buying starting in Junior High School (now called Middle School). I could identify any airplane from the oldest to the most recent, or I would know where to look it up. Then I did cars. Then back to Aviation, at about the time the Space race was starting to capture attention. As an electrical engineering student during the Vietnam War my goal was to stay out of the war by getting a deferred job in the Defense industry, and so I went to work for an Aerospace company when I graduated. I worked on missile systems for 12 years, and then moved to space systems to the remaining 20 years of my career, gravitating towards software requirements. Eventually I was the lead of a software requirements and design group until I retired in 1999.

OK, so that’s my resumé, but what about Typophilia? In 1982 I got my first computer, an Atari 800. I also added an Epson dot matrix printer a couple of years later, and found out that I could change the type it used by entering codes for the letterforms. I started looking for typefaces to use as models, sent away for Image Club and Adobe catalogs, and the rest is history. I found something new to identify — fonts. In 1993 when I got my first Mac, I couldn’t wait to buy fonts for it. Now many thousands of fonts later, it shocks me to add up what I have spent on them, as those of you so afflicted know all too well.

Somewhere in the process of making typefaces for my printer (and then my computer screen) I started looking much more closely at the subtle things about typefaces. Like most people I read books and used type that way, without ever really looking at the type, but now I was, and I saw that there were many differences. This meant there was something else I could become good at identifying!

Few people, but me, cared that I could identify type, until I discovered internet newsgroups after I retired. alt.binaries.fonts and comp.fonts became my introduction to the community of Typophiliacs, and I was no longer alone. I hung out and ID’d fonts, and kept seeing the same questions coming up over and over. It was so inefficient. I decided that font lovers could use Guides, just like bird lovers, and I started my first Guide to catalog Bauhaus-style fonts. I had volunteers from the newsgroups who helped me collect samples, and I used my web site as the place to put the Guide. Then it became clear to me how often there were questions about Script faces, and the Script Font ID Guide was started. I had a group of over 50 volunteers from all over the world who helped add samples to the Guide, which is still growing, and has over 3,150 hand-drawn font styles catalogued in 14 style categories. I think it is the most comprehensive collection of those fonts anywhere,online or in print.

The Nature Guide model kept driving me to try to come up with ways that people without a lot of specialized knowledge could be able to identify typefaces. Sans Serif fonts were always hard to ID, because they seemed to be so similar, but structurally there were earmarks that could help narrow the choices. The physical attributes of 7 letters became the basis for my keying system for Sans Serif fonts, just the way fish books used fin configurations, spines and mouth placement as keys to direct you towards the right species of fish. The Sans Serif Font ID Guide was my first Keyed Guide.

It was after this time, roughly the middle of 2003, that someone from the newsgroups directed me to the Type ID Board, and this is where I have hung out since then. It was nice to be away from the greedy acquisitiveness of so many of the newsgroup folks who were mostly interested in getting fonts from each other. I had always made it known there that all I would do is help identify fonts, but at Typophile those were already the rules, and I didn’t have to keep defending my position.

Next came the Lined Fonts ID Guide, thanks to a thread on Typophile that started cataloguing multilined fonts. Typophiles Mike Freiman and Ignacio Martinez were generous contributors to that Guide.

To wrap up this first entry, I come to the most ambitious Guide, in many ways. My current project, with the help of several people, and most particularly my friend ‘P. Etz’ (pseudonym) from Germany, who has implemented the page design, is the Serif Font ID Guide. This Guide uses a true interactive interface to let the user select attributes of twelve key letters and then see the fonts that have the same attributes. Currently there are over 950 typeface families described, and samples illustrating them are still being collected. We have about 2/3 of the familes with at least a Key sample.

I invite people to ask font ID questions directly, using the e-mail link on my FontSpotting page. I will continue to hang out as often as I can and try to help with the Type ID Board. I feel that I have really found the right place at last to let my Typophilia out in the open. It’s a great bunch of people here, and I feel happy and honored to obsess about type with all of you.

- Mike Yanega

Go gettum Mike!
:-)

ChrisL

Mike, your identifications guides are a tremendous resource. I’ve always wondered what your story was, and now I know. As a fellow frequent font sleuth, I am surprised at how different your background is from mine, with the (probably meaningless) exception that we were both Atari 800 users. (Commodores suck! oh never mind.)

Thanks Chris & Mark for your comments.

Mark, if you ever find yourself with some spare time, there are a few of your fonts that I haven’t collected yet for some of my Guides. If you e-mail I can send you templates.

I never fail to be impressed by how much you know about fonts. Apparently your type library is at least as deep as mine, and probably deeper in historical typefaces.

Thanks for all the help and information you provide here.

- Mike Yanega