This week in type: What Is Sans Serif?

Comic Sans Papyrus.

Nobody does type marketing better than Hoefler & Frere-Jones Co. You heard about Operator everywhere. You saw the video. You heard about it on a Monocle podcast. To paraphrase Will & Grace, dead people know about Operator.

And it solves a problem nobody has, namely “I don’t have a really good font to ‘code’ in,” where “code” is a verb. Everybody who “codes” solved the type problem with any of the last three or four typeface releases that promised to do so. Someday somebody will design a font for “coding” and will present sample uses that do not resemble Windows 3.1 angry fruit salad. I use black on pink.

Richard Ishida outglyphs himself: Hieroglyphics picker. (Those “code points” are awesome.)

Hobo. (Hobeaux!) San Francisco.

Do you remember a hand carrying out calligraphy in the intro video for the iPad Pro? No, you don’t, because that was in the video for the Apple Pencil. I know whose hand that wasn’t, but JFP gave it a shot for real.

Almost as many Webfonts in Blendle as there are ways to render the word “Webfonts,” namely 200.

Upside-down N (but lOWERCASE l).

You can download scans of 64 issues of The Monotype Recorder. I did. (Always use an FTP program, not a browser.)

“How to make your text look futuristic” (but Desert Chrome).

Speaking of which, is the value proposition of a streetcar (“LRT”) in Brooklyn actually the unrealistically-well-rendered futuristic type of its destination signage?

I have heard the adorable Michael Bierut spontaneously curse in a video recording, but I am not going to tell you where. He cites Miles Davis as an influence, while some of us have Desert Chrome or Letraset or Space: 1999 as influences. Xavier Dolan basically didn’t see any movies older than Titanic, either.

“WHAT IS SANS SERIF?”

(Bad type on Jeopardy.)

“ACT Ⅱ: BRUTÉ.”

Sansserif Cherokee that is not Gadugi or Phoreus.

Also not Gadugi: Microsoft allegedly has “a font and system of text wrapping that makes reading easier for dyslexics – but also faster for those without dyslexia.” (“Easier” vs. “faster.”)

And, by any standard, the biggest news of the “week,” covered in another drawer: James Montalbano gets the royal shaft, and reacts appropriately.

• “This notice terminates the Interim Approval for Use of Clearview Font”
• Times guest editorial: “I can’t help wondering if something else is afoot. To use Clearview, state departments of transportation had to pay a licensing fee”
• Tsunami-like aftershocks felt as far away as Ohio