Too busy to draw

I’m busy designing a book but I just thought I’d take a moment to express my thanks to the unsung heroes of the design world – type designers. I’m using Warnock pro and I’m overwhelmed with the all the choices I have typographically. There are four slightly differently designed sub-families – Caption for sizes 6–8pt (where the thins are less thin than regular and the kerning is looser to aid legibility). Regular for bodytext sizes 9–13pt. Subhead for sizes 14–24pt and Display for sizes 25–72pt (with greater contrast between thick and thin and all sorts of subtle adjustments to allow for a larger size). In each of the subfamilies there are four weights, together with their italic versions. In each font there are real small caps, ligatures, foreign characters, fractions, typographic ornaments, oldstyle figures.

It’s like the joy of having the biggest possible set of coloured pencils. Adobe type designer Robert Slimbach has designed a beautiful typeface – and don’t get me going on his other delicious typeface Brioso pro.

I thought I’d set the words ‘Fiji fiji’ for you because the lowercase version shows off one of the Warnock ligatures, and the uppercase version is an interesting word typographically because it’s one of the very few (if any) words used in English that has three dotted letters one after the other. And also because the current BBC1 TV series ‘South Pacific’ is making me feel homesick for Fiji.