I Love Typography was born from the love of type — it’s in the name. The ILT blog exists to share that love, whether it’s about the design of fonts, their use (typography), or their invention and history. If you’re new here, then typography 101 is a good place to start. If you’re interested in graphic design, interviews with designers or the science and craft of designing typefaces and making fonts, then we have you covered too. We also have a substantial collection of long-form articles — meticulously researched and compelling stories about Type History and Typographic Firsts. Looking to have some fun while learning the basics? Play one of six Font Games, covering font anatomy, font identification, and early print history.
Popular categories
Typography 101: Typography is about guidelines rather than rules or prescriptions. Learn them here.
Interviews: What makes designers tick? How do they work? What inspires them?
Type History: Learn how typography transformed the world with a mix of short- & long-form articles.
Book Reviews: books about type design, graphic design and design history.
Popular articles: Graphic Design
What are Optotypes?
The Last Word on Helvetica?
A Firm Turn Toward the Objective
The Helvetica Story
Graphic Masterpieces of Chernikhov
Popular articles: Typography & Book History
Make the Initial Bigger
Who Invented the Alphabet?
Penny Dreadfuls & Murder Broadsides
The Writing Mistress
Emoji b4 emoji
Who Invented the Index?
Death of a Typeface
Black Print: A Brief History
Botticelli & the Typographers
The Most Dangerous Book in the World
Printing History: Typographic Firsts
The First Roman Fonts
First Female Typographer
First Printer’s Mark
First Children’s Books
First Printed Herbals
First Fashion Books
Invention of the Title Page
First Cook Books
First Illustrated Books
First Math Book
Designing typefaces: Making fonts
Stories and interviews about the science and craft of designing typefaces.
Designing Antarctican
The Music of Type Design
Making a Chromatic Typeface
Krul: The Untold History
Climbing Everest: Zapfino Arabic
Designing Type Systems
The Questa Project
OpenType: Engaging contextuality
Beauty & Ugliness in Type Design
A Few Things I’ve Learned About Type Design
A Design of a Signage Typeface
Making GT Sectra
Letters in Wonderland
Typography 101: Fundamentals
Arial vs Helvetica
Think you can tell them apart? The rumble in the font jungle: Seconds our, round one…
A Brief History of Typography
A short intro to the history of typography and European printing & type classification.
Who Shot the Serif?
Know your serifs. A brief guide to various serif types.
On Choosing Type
The art of typography and type choice.
Extreme Type Terminology
“The detection of types is one of the most elementary branches of knowledge…”
Embracing White Space
Learn to master this crucial aspect of typography, type- and graphic design.
A Font Lover’s Guide to Numerals
Do you know your tubular figures from your old style figures?
Apostrophes Don’t Swing Both Ways
Why the apostrophe mustn’t swing both ways!
Lists: Curated fonts
Must-have Fonts of 2025
Expert Lists: Fonts for Culture Branding
Expert Lists: Seb Lester’s fav Calligraphy Fonts
Expert Lists: Fonts for Books
Expert Lists: Fonts for UI/UX Design
Expert Lists: Fonts for the Metaverse
Favorite Fonts of 2023
Must-have Fonts of 2023
Favorite Fonts of 2022
Font Games: Play & Learn
The Font Game: Level 1
How well do you know your fonts? 30 multiple-choice questions will test your font identification skills.
The Font Anatomy Game
How well do you know your fonts? Can you tell your flags from your finials, your loops from your legs?
Early Printing Quiz
Back to school! What do you remember about early European printing?
The Font Game: Level 2
Test your font identification skills: This one is really hard!
How Well do You Know Gutenberg?
Test your knowledge of Gutenberg with our multiple-choice quiz.
The Glorious Glyphs Game
Know you flag from your finial, your ligature from your lambda? 30 multiple-choice questions.
The Font Game: Level 1 (timed)
Same as the Font Game but with a twist: just 2 minutes to answer 30 multiple-choice questions.
Full Blog Archive
2025
- Jul 24 Love Notes
- May 23 Typography Matters
- Apr 16 The Music of Type Design
- Aug 24 Quality Web Fonts
- Jun 28 The L in ILT
- May 4 50% off Fonts
- Apr 5 Fonts for Luxury Brands
- Mar 23 Hot New Fonts: spring 2023
- Mar 14 ILT’s Favorite Fonts of 2022
- Mar 10 Power up your design game!
- Mar 4 Hot New Fonts: Rotulo
- Feb 28 Expressive script fonts
- Feb 24 Three Free Fonts
- Feb 22 Fonts for Editorial Design
- Feb 20 Stellar Serifs: Sisteron
- Nov 9 Pimp My Type!
- Oct 19 Making friends with SideNote
- Sep 21 Featured Fonts
- Jul 20 Featured Fonts
- Jun 28 21 New Foundries Join ILT
- Jun 28 A Year in Type
- May 31 The Month in Type: May 2022
- Apr 27 The Month in Type: Fun type
- Apr 20 Fonts to Fall in Love With
- Apr 13 Fantastic New Fonts
- Apr 8 Bodoni Egyptian Mono
- Apr 6 Layfort font family
- Mar 17 Font Fashion Week
- Feb 23 The Month in Type: Feb 2020
- Feb 16 Featured Fonts: Feb 2022
- Feb 9 Hot new fonts
- Jan 19 My Favorite Fonts of 2021
- Dec 28 The Year in Type
- Dec 17 Fonts in Focus: Palast
- Nov 30 The Month in Type: Nov. 2021
- Nov 26 Why Bold not Black Friday?
- Nov 24 Welcome to the family!
- Jul 28 Fonts in the Twilight Zone
- Jul 21 On Type Design & Volcanoes
- Jul 15 Ask ILT: Fashion Fonts
- Apr 3 Fonts in Focus: Louche
- Mar 8 Women of Letters
- Dec 12 Dragons & Unicorns
- Nov 8 Emoji b4 emoji
- Sep 28 Who invented the newspaper?
- Sep 3 Prints & Propaganda
- Aug 20 Make the Letter Bigger
- Jul 31 Inventing Posters
- Jul 11 Black Print
- Jun 30 Font Anatomy Game
- Jun 18 The Writing Mistress
- Jun 8 The Font Game (level 2)
- Jun 6 Death of a Typeface
- May 25 Fun with Fonts
- May 25 The Glorious Glyphs Game
- May 25 ILT QUIZ: Early Printing
- May 25 ILT QUIZ: Gutenberg
- Feb 15 Fonts in Focus: two
- Jan 27 Point, don’t point
- Jan 13 The Oldest Book in America
- Dec 2 The Geometer’s Compass
- Oct 11 The Secret Life of Books
- Sep 13 Meditations on Snowflakes
- Aug 21 Pomp, Type & Circumstance
- Jul 4 Renaissance memes
- Jun 10 The Pope’s Romance
- Apr 17 In the Shadow of Notre Dame
- Mar 14 The First Printed Math Books
- Feb 28 Renaissance Metal
- Nov 20 Magic Printed
- Aug 24 Who Invented the Index?
- Jul 6 The Art of Printing War
- May 22 Making Teddy
- Mar 20 Astronomical Typography
- Feb 7 Making Antarctican
- Dec 19 Designing Wind
- Oct 19 Designing Hebrew Type
- Jul 24 Endangered Alphabets
- May 31 The First Cookbook
- May 9 On the Nature of Things
- Mar 17 TypeParis
- Mar 10 Post with YouTube Video
- Jan 30 Thesaurus
- Jul 14 Making Fonts: Proza Libre
- Jun 14 Making Grifo
- Apr 18 The First Roman Fonts
- Mar 17 New Lands in Arabic Type
- Feb 14 The First Title-Pages
- Feb 1 Universal Grotesk
- Jan 13 Designing Vinter
- Dec 31 This Month in Typography
- Nov 20 Pure Gold
- Nov 10 The First Illustrated Books
- Sep 21 This Month in Typography
- Sep 7 Printing the Stars
- Aug 25 Font Marathon
- Aug 7 This Month in Typography
- Jun 29 ILT 2015
- Jun 27 The Last Word on Helvetica?
- Jun 17 The Pattern Project
- Jun 12 Making Fonts: Essonnes
- Jun 1 This Month in Typography
- May 22 Alphabets of Wood
- May 14 Type Design Week
- May 5 Making Fonts: SINDELAR
- Apr 24 This Month in Typography
- Mar 22 The First Printers’ Mark
- Mar 8 This Month in Typography
- Feb 22 Climbing Everest
- Feb 4 This Month in Typography
- Jan 27 Murder in Italic
- Jan 13 Making Fonts: GT Sectra
- Jan 5 This Month in Typography
- Dec 2 This Month in Typography
- Nov 25 Notes on the first Italic
- Nov 18 Letters in Wonderhand
- Nov 13 New Fonts 1
- Oct 29 This Month In Typography
- Oct 15 The First Female Typographer
- Oct 8 The Questa Project
- Oct 3 Type on Screen
- Sep 26 This Month in Typography
- Jun 27 This Week in Fonts
- Apr 19 Cloths of heaven
- Apr 14 An idea of a typeface
- Apr 3 The Sign Painter
- Feb 28 Clampersand
- Feb 14 Making Signo
- Jan 28 Marvelous Medieval Books
- Dec 10 Last-minute gift ideas
- Dec 9 It’s big, it’s 1001 pt
- Nov 19 Drawing Line
- Nov 11 One Hel(vetica) of a Story
- Nov 1 Proza’s story
- Sep 23 Lava — Voice of a Magazine
- Sep 13 Interview: Xavier Dupré
- Jul 4 This Week in Fonts
- Jun 6 A Typographic Carousel
- Apr 27 Shameless
- Apr 25 Making waves with Magasin
- Feb 24 Crafting Type
- Feb 13 Lettering versus Calligraphy
- Jan 3 Codex Editorial Board
- Oct 16 Hipster Hummingbirds
- Sep 24 The Complete Engraver
- Jul 29 The Week in Type
- May 15 Novel Constructions
- May 10 Offscreen
- May 9 A Pocket Cathedral
- May 2 Type Matters
- Apr 28 Make the margins bigger
- Apr 11 Designing Type Systems
- Apr 6 Type Camp India
- Mar 9 Letters & Stone
- Mar 6 We love your streets
- Feb 26 Garçon Grotesque
- Feb 21 FF Ernestine
- Feb 11 Costco Typography
- Nov 18 Heaven Devoid of Stars
- Oct 6 Steve Jobs
- Oct 5 The making of FF Tundra
- Sep 25 ATypI 2011 Reykjavík
- Sep 18 Gay type
- Aug 30 Peace
- Jul 30 All sorts of type
- Jun 11 Codex
- May 26 TYPO-Berlin
- May 12 All kinds of type
- Apr 1 Engaging Contextuality
- Mar 11 Through Thick and Thin
- Feb 28 iType
- Jan 28 MOMA on the money
- Jan 8 Sayonara 2010
- Dec 11 Codex type
- Dec 7 Helvetica vs. Arial app
- Dec 3 Jean-Luc (Godard)
- Dec 1 Capucine
- Nov 30 Reverting to Type
- Nov 24 HTML5 Books?
- Nov 24 Typographic Heavy Metal
- Nov 24 Piel Script
- Nov 20 Moveable Type
- Nov 19 Kim Rugg
- Nov 18 Kickstart Linotype
- Nov 12 It’s what you see
- Nov 10 The original typomaniac
- Nov 7 Letterpressed wings
- Nov 5 Linotype the movie
- Nov 5 Paula Scher
- Nov 2 Reviving Caslon
- Oct 27 Jonathan Barnbrook
- Oct 25 TELEPHONEME
- Oct 20 Paper typography
- Oct 19 Amman
- Oct 10 The making of Acorde
- Sep 12 Fontula
- Sep 8 Geotica
- Aug 31 Lesson Plan
- Aug 20 Webtype
- Aug 18 Anchor
- Aug 17 Panno Text
- Aug 16 Fan Script
- Aug 15 Acorde
- Jul 29 Jessica Hische
- Jul 26 Reviving Caslon
- Jul 23 Rue Display
- Jul 22 Ready Media
- Jul 21 FontFont it!
- Jul 18 8 Faces
- Jul 13 iFontMaker for iPad
- Jul 13 Eames House Blocks
- Jul 13 New Veer
- Jul 11 Typarchive
- Jul 10 Typeface Design
- Jul 8 WebINK
- Jul 4 iPad vs Kindle
- Jul 4 Jules Verne
- Jul 1 New FontFont webfonts
- Jun 30 Folder Type
- Jun 21 Font Hinting
- Jun 16 World Cup part 2
- Jun 15 World Cup
- Jun 4 HTML5
- May 25 Founders Grotesk
- May 20 Google Font Directory
- May 14 David Carson
- May 12 Robin Nicholas
- May 7 Founders Grotesk
- May 4 More House
- May 4 More Web Fonts
- May 4 Walking with Shaw
- May 3 The Art of Hermann Zapf
- May 3 Web Fonts
- Apr 29 Creating Grand Gargantua
- Apr 28 Molten glass
- Apr 27 Hand-painted sign
- Apr 17 The Vignelli Twelve
- Apr 8 What the iPad lacks
- Apr 4 José Mendoza y Almeida
- Mar 31 Deck Playing Cards
- Mar 31 Blazing
- Mar 30 Type Matters
- Mar 29 Gerrit Noordzij on drawing
- Mar 23 Creative Review redesign
- Mar 23 Stencil lettering
- Mar 21 The type we want
- Mar 18 iPhone, iFont
- Mar 14 Process Type Foundry
- Mar 13 Stanley Morison
- Mar 11 Ditoria
- Mar 10 Colosseo
- Mar 9 The book & the iPad
- Mar 8 Alex Trochut
- Mar 8 Font Haus
- Mar 7 Cieszyn Print Library
- Mar 7 Incunabula
- Feb 18 Designing Armitage
- Feb 2 Art and Text
- Jan 21 My favorite fonts of 2009
- Jan 5 Twenty-ten type
- Dec 15 The Making of Vesper
- Dec 14 Our own alphabet
- Dec 4 Wishing on a typeface
- Nov 20 The Right Type of Education
- Oct 25 Sex, lies, & type
- Oct 6 Type Camp
- Sep 23 Karbon type
- Sep 17 Tungsten type
- Aug 29 Encyclopædic type
- Aug 17 Type Radio
- Aug 13 The making of FF Duper
- Aug 7 The Font-as-Service
- Jul 20 Web fonts — where are we?
- Jul 18 iQ font
- Jul 6 Mojo Type
- Jun 22 KLIM Type
- Jun 3 Genuine imitations
- May 11 Show some restraint
- Apr 30 The second coming
- Apr 15 We love typography
- Apr 5 Yes, we kern
- Mar 23 The first one’s the hardest
- Mar 17 Malabar type family released
- Mar 11 Watchmen watchtype
- Feb 28 Read between the leading
- Feb 20 TDC2 2009 results
- Feb 15 iFont, iPhone
- Feb 8 Chelsea, darling
- Jan 31 Projected type
- Jan 24 On diacritics
- Jan 20 Greener type
- Jan 5 To a typetastic new year
- Dec 30 Reminga bold italic
- Dec 18 the week in type — Zócalo
- Dec 14 The Type Directors Club
- Dec 11 An interview with Seb Lester
- Dec 7 Free fonts from FontFont
- Nov 28 the week in Type: good type
- Nov 22 Printing — how it used to be
- Nov 20 Footnotes *†‡§
- Nov 17 The week in type: die neue
- Nov 11 The week in type: casanova
- Nov 5 Vote
- Oct 30 I Love Type Links 1
- Oct 29 Sunday Type: tomate type
- Oct 22 Sunday Type: mightier type
- Oct 15 Sunday Type: inspiring type
- Oct 7 Sunday type: kokoro type
- Oct 3 BraveFont
- Oct 3 Diacritical Challenge
- Sep 30 Obama Village
- Sep 29 Sunday Type: lettercult type
- Sep 27 Friday Flickr Found Type
- Sep 21 Sunday Type: czech type
- Sep 18 Museo Sans released
- Sep 12 Reading Class of 2008
- Sep 9 Sunday Type: tsang type
- Sep 4 FF Meta Serif Microsite
- Aug 26 Sunday Type: dilbert type
- Aug 22 Type and Media Masters
- Aug 18 Sunday Type: ornament type
- Aug 11 Sunday Type: favourite type
- Jul 27 Sunday Type: book type
- Jul 24 Letterpress From Scratch
- Jul 21 Sunday type: napkin type
- Jul 15 Sunday Type: incubator type
- Jul 6 Sunday Type: stern type
- Jul 2 Type Camp 2008
- Jun 29 Sunday Type: garbage type
- Jun 23 Sunday Type: vintage type
- Jun 16 Sunday Type: paragraph type
- May 26 Sunday Type
- May 19 Sunday Type: community type
- May 16 eXtreme Type Terminology
- May 12 Sunday type: crossword type
- May 5 Sunday Type: mirror type
- Apr 27 Sunday Type: smoking type
- Apr 25 eXtreme Type Terminology
- Apr 21 Sunday Type: matrix type
- Apr 13 Sunday type: ampersand type
- Apr 11 eXtreme Type Terminology
- Apr 4 On Choosing Type
- Mar 30 Sunday Type: farnham type
- Mar 27 eXtreme Type Terminology
- Mar 23 Sunday Type: bright type
- Mar 21 eXtreme Type Terminology
- Mar 17 Sunday Type: monday type
- Mar 7 The Best Type of 2007
- Feb 28 A guide to Web typography
- Feb 26 National News
- Feb 24 Sunday Type: fruity type
- Feb 20 Small Caps
- Feb 17 Sunday Type: pointy type
- Feb 14 Typeface Review: Arnhem
- Feb 10 Sunday Type: sponge type
- Feb 3 Sunday Type: Frodo Type
- Feb 3 FontBook
- Feb 3 Porque Bembo Cansa
- Feb 3 TIPOLOGIA
- Jan 29 セリフを撃ったのは誰？
- Jan 27 Sunday Type: Mel Gibson Type
- Jan 24 FontBook
- Jan 22 Why Bembo Sucks
- Jan 20 Sunday Type: Spaced-out Type
- Jan 13 Sunday Type: Potato Type
- Jan 12 Type Snippets
- Jan 9 打造你自己的字体（III）实例研究：Joules
- Jan 6 Sunday Type: Iso Type
- Dec 30 Sunday Type: Feel Type
- Dec 28 Type faces
- Dec 23 Sunday type: Evan’s Type
- Dec 15 Sunday Type: x-rated type!
- Dec 13 Counterpunch
- Nov 26 Sunday Type: Crap Type
- Nov 18 Sunday Type
- Nov 14 At last! FF Meta Serif
- Nov 4 Sunday Type: FREE FONTS
- Oct 28 Sunday type: Spiekermann
- Oct 26 Made With FontFont
- Oct 21 Sunday Type
- Oct 19 Ellen Lupton The Movie
- Oct 17 Kinescope Font Winner
- Oct 13 Kinescope
- Oct 13 Thinking With Type Prizes
- Oct 9 Thinking With Type
- Oct 6 Arial versus Helvetica
- Oct 5 Typography Videos
- Sep 24 I Love Typography is Moving
- Sep 23 Baskerville, John
- Sep 9 Quien mató al serif?
- Sep 2 The Return of the Serif
- Aug 30 Typography Kills!
- Aug 26 Who shot the serif?
- Aug 19 Identify that Font
- Aug 14 Type You Like Mobile
- Aug 10 Smashing typography
- Aug 7 Helmut Schmid
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