This is a subject I've been fascinated with since my freshman year of design school, after writing a paper about Matthew Carter and his work like Bell Centennial for phone books, Verdana for the screen, and Olympian for newspapers. I'd love to learn more about typefaces like this that have been designed to perform in really specific settings. Anyone know of any examples?
–> also for phone books
Minuscule, designed for extremely small sizes
http://typographica.org/2008/typeface-reviews/minuscule/
May have been mentioned in the other threads but there's DowText the H&FJ font created specifcially for stock listings.
Also the FontFont font Axel designed specifically for spreadsheets. http://www.fontshop.com/blog/newsletters/digest/may09b/
House's current marketing material doesn't say anything about this, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that Paperback was designed to (aptly enough) work well on the cheap paper of mass-market paperbacks.
I made a Tang family specifically for use in small sizes; ink traps are 10 em units, which is a lot compared to most fonts. But during production I decided to make additional weights, since the forms started to look very interesting.
Here's a sample:
Can't think of any right now (by name) but weren't some fonts designed for computer programming. Unique 1 and 0, and monospaced widths.
>Can’t think of any right now (by name) but weren’t some fonts designed for computer programming. Unique 1 and 0, and monospaced widths.
Consolas would probably count on two fronts - designed for coding and for ClearType. Which kind of leads one to consider OCR A and B - fonts designed to be read by computers as well as humans, and maybe code 39 barcodes - fonts designed to be read just by computers :-)
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