Ah! Venice...

White… is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black… God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

As a child, I kept several little black books full of lists. I loved making lists. I carved out my identity by the lists I made. These things I liked. These were a few of my favourite things. By extension, I didn’t like those things that didn’t make it into the books. Gradually I defined my identity and distinguished myself from those that were around me. Not only was I different in these specific ways, but I also had these other specific things in common.

After I got older, my viewpoints changed and matured and I realised that the world was bigger and less able to fit into a little black book. The world was like math. As a child, I lived with the world of arithmetic and it worked well for my limited viewpoint. Growing older, however, my horizons expanded and suddenly arithmetic wasnt enough to understand the world. My perspective had to change to include algebra. More maturing, and even the algebraic world that I lived in was insufficient and I had to learn calculus. Now I live in a world of quantum physics…

The little black books are kept around as a reminder of my childhood mostly. Much of those things which are listed are still my favourites, however. The categories I use are nearly as telling as the lists themselves. Some are basic. My favourite composers. My favourite kinds of trees (although I broke them down into broadleaf and coniferous). My favourite colours….

Colours are fascinating. They have changed over the years but somehow they have stayed the same. I think that the basic colours have not changed as much as how I defined them. For example, I remember listing red as a fav and then, later, changing it to brown. Still later it was red-orange - then maroon. Grey has always been at the top of the list while the remaining colours have jumped around for the remaining positions. That in itself is interesting because grey isnt really a colour - its a combination of two colours: black and white.

My girlfriend has synesthesia which is where nerve endings in the brain that relate to sensory perception kind of overlap (in a grossly simplistic definition) and things are perceived differently than is considered normal (which could easily segue to the topic of what is normal but lets just stick to colours for now). Synesthesia is most frequently expressed in a mental association of certain colours to certain letters of the alphabet or numbers or even symbols where the synesthete sees a “Q” as being a blue colour instead of the black letter on a page. In a nearly subconscious way, the words in a book all have colours and blend or clash accordingly.

This idea of colour composition has brought me back to my list of favourite colours. In thinking about all of this over the past several weeks, I realised that it wasnt so much that I had favourite colours as I had favourite colour combinations. That epiphany cleared a lot of things up in my mind. It wasnt so much that grey was my favourite as how much I liked the synergy of what happened when black combined with white. It was powerful and beautiful and much more than the two colours were capable of on their own. There were so many permutations and possibilities.

Have you ever heard of cows? The question presents a nice little pun that has been in my family for as long as I can remember. As a child, there was a time when I was fascinated by what various things were called when named collectively. Some terms are familiar such as a “herd of cows” or a “flock of sheep". Others are less well known: a “bevy of quail", a “cete of badgers", a “sounder of wild boar".

Recently while thinking about these collective names, I realised a simple truth about Christianity. When two or more Christians “flock” together, they form a church. Forget about the idea of buildings and services. A church is in essence a “gathering of believers". There are too many preconceptions about what a “church” looks like and we even use the phrase “going to church” but the reality is much more simple and profound. As a group of wolves is called a pack, a group of Christians is called a church.

Over the years, I have used many different fonts in many different ways but there have been a few that have stayed with me consistently as favourites. Several font designers have found a special place in my heart and I use their creations more frequently than others. I have tried to sprinkle examples throughout these pages.

First and foremost is Michael Everson. He is a linguist who has created locale and language information for many languages, from support for Irish and the other Celtic langauges to the minority languages of Finland. He has specialised in fonts for obscure languages and alphabets. He is one of the co-authors of the Unicode Standard. His font, Everson Mono, is a favourite that I use on my computer as a base font.

Next is Matthew Carter who designed the Verdana, Tahoma, New Century Schoolbook, and Georgia fonts. He is a prolific designer who has created the best of the Microsoft fonts. He co-founded Bitstream in 1981.

Thirdly we have Hermann Zapf, a calligrapher and book designer who has created some of the most significant fonts of the 20th century. His fonts include: Aldus, Aurelia, Edison, Kompakt, Marconi, Medici Script, Melior, Noris LT, Optima, Optima Nova LT, Orion LT, Palatino, Saphir, Sistina, Vario, Venture LT, ITC Zapf Book, ITC Zapf Chancery, ITC Zapf Dingbats, Zapf Essentials LT, ITC Zapf International, Linotype Zapfino, and Zapf Renaissance.

Vincent Connare, another great Microsoft designer, created Comic Sans, Trebuchet, and Webdings.

Aldus Manutius is one of the most significant designers in history. A student of Gutenberg, he moved to Venice in the 15th century and began his own printing press. He was the first to use the type form that we now call italic. Modern fonts directly descended from his creations include Bembo and Poliphilus.

Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko founded the magazine / font foundry Emigre in 1984 and have done more in the following years to free font and print design from the stodgy past than anybody else.