The Designer's Guide to Web Type:
Your Connection to the Best Fonts Online

Kathleen Ziegler and Nick Greco, Editors

ISBN 0-06-093373-9

Dimensional Illustrators, Inc. and HBI-HarperCollins International

There's something about a paper print sample that makes type selection so much easier. Even though type designers are flocking onto the Web with font sites, the usual gifs are hardly high-res enough to make a truly informed decision. Looking for novel typefaces for use in print and in graphics would be easier with this volume at hand. Featuring new display typefaces, Web Type also points you at the Web sites that offer these designs.

Need a Neo-Geo, It's here. Nostalgic for grunge, here; eerie otherworldliness, here; businesslike bitmaps, here; clear calligraphics, here; solid display text, here; even a few potential body types too.

Web Type includes listings from some of the greats, and from new talents, from established companies to the guy down the street.

Web Type is divided into two parts. Each face is first displayed with artists' interpretations in promotional or in-use images, and then again as a full alphabet (A-z, a-z, 0-9). This dual showing allows the user to see the typeface in a headline setting, with an opportunity to check the character set for those characters that are most important to a logo or product name.

The full-color artists' pages are well printed, and include contact, biographic, and fontographic information about the contents. References to the alphabetic showings point the user to the second section of the book, where the typefaces are displayed in black-on-white and white-on-black.

The huge contrast of the colorfully freeform artists' pages and the orderly font pages is striking, and hints at the very broad range of uses these typeface could be put to in a similar range of designers' work.

A clever use of the footer margin places the typeface name (set in the typeface, of course) in a position so that a viewer can riffle the pages and have a quick animated preview of each spreads' contents.

Web Type is a book for cuttingedgers who like to keep a honing stone handy, who like to keep up on the latest directions in print and the Web. Even if the book ages, the included links make finding the sources for the typefaces easy. If there is one lack, it is the absence of a URL for a central Web page linking to the type foundries and designers listed here; but their own URLs are prominent, and easy to transcribe.

Gary Munch
2001-07-25