From the Trenches

If typefaces were colors, Perpetua would sing quinacridone magenta, then shift up an italic octave to California sunrises. I am swimming in Perpetua these days, which is slightly decadent, slightly not quite anybody’s mandated style, slightly involves flying under the radar of the various style dictators. I have no business having this much fun on a project that is so big, so consuming, so apparently stressful. I’m not stressed. Milagro.

Sabon would be blue, dark blue, but not quite Prussian. Garamond would also be blue but lighter. Cochin would surely be cochineal, ludicrous, outlandish, especially with that italic “n,” dancing on a page like a medieval tumbler.

Berkeley, my bread-and-butter, would bear the golden crust of homemade loaves.

Helvetica, of course, black. And Futura. And Gill Sans. Hmm. Something about those sans-serifs, lining up behind the Trajan column again. Perhaps they are only slate gray, perhaps tinged with light green, like smooth serpentine slopes with a red splash of Clarkia.

Arial is not a typeface. It’s a bastardized corporate THING. It is gray-brown, not organic soil, not the beautiful shiny chestnut of a buckeye or loquat seed, not the textured beauty of walnut desks, not the gold on an eagle’s coverts, but sludge.