This sounds vaguely familiar. I'll check my references when I get back to the office and let you know the source. Unless Tiffany gets to it first.

-- K.

Hrant's paraphrase above comes from Dwiggins's Layout in Advertising [Harper and Brothers, New York, 1928]. In the section on Type, he begins

"What type does the architect of advertising elect to use, and why? That question is the acolyte's invariable first prayer for enlightenment -- phrased always in one of the various voices of despair -- what type shall I use? The gods refuse an answer. They refuse (sacrilege though it be to say it) because they do not know.

"The gods of advertising turn their backs. Can we -- left to our own resources -- get any hints from the specimen-books? -- from the treatises on type? -- from schools that teach printing? -- from the lectures of experts? We cannot.

"We have left, then, only one course to pursue -- to learn from the advertisements themselves."

-- Kent.

Kent, thanks for the full quote.

Resume flogging.

hhp

And just don't start on whether any symbol god might have would be a logo or a trademark

God wouldn't need a computer to use a font. What did they do before the invention of computers, write books with itsy bitsy little paint brushes? :-p

Since God is the author of creation and part of every living mortal on this planet than it is more or less sane to say that every font has been created and/or use at one point in time by himself.

There is a "god" but it doesn't really deal with fonts. Nor humans.

hhp

"God is dead." -- Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead." -- God
"Neitzsche is God." -- The Dead

Hey God,

What's the font you used on your site?

It looks *an awful lot* like Arial.

And while we're at it, why black? Black's too cool for you.

God used a font to engrave the Ten Commandments on the stone tablets, but it must have been a human font as that is all we could understand.

It wasn't a Roman font, of course. It also wasn't the current script that Hebrew is written in, as this is Aramaic, not Hebrew. The ancient Hebrews picked up this pen drawn script during the Bablyonian exile. The original Hebrew fonts were straight line fonts, scratched in clay, like Sumarian. These originals were put on coins during the Bar Cochba rebellion (135), before it was crushed by the Romans (sigh).

But Hebrew was the Canaanite language. Moses and his followers would have spoken the Egyptian language, but perhaps among themselves something more similar to Aramaic, as Abraham came from there.

Now the Arc of the Covenant is famously missing, so to find the answer I guess we'll have to wait for Indiana Jones to find it before we'll have an answer.

Now the Arc of the Covenant is famously missing...

Apparently it is in Ethiopia, but only one man gets to see it, and I doubt very much if he ever looks inside.

Oh-Oh. I am getting too good at this faux Talumd stuff. It turns out there is actually a Rabbinic discussion of this. The Ten Commandments begins with the word 'I', and the Hebrew in the Torah is 'anochi' instead of the usual word for 'I', and the Rabbis speculate that this was in the people's dialect, not yet the Hebrew of the Bible.

But wait, it gets better. The Jewish mystics, the kabbalists, thought that each (Hebrew, = Aramaic) letter had a mystical significance. Here is a contemporary book on it, available also in delux edition. http://www.jewishlights.com/books/001.html

But wait, it gets still better. The mystics thought that you could study a passage of holy text until the words became meaningless and the letters formed into new messages, and the adept would soar in mystical ecstacy.

Of course there was also 'practical Kabala' in which with the right Hebrew incantations you could do magic, such as bringing the dead to life. For example the english 'abracedabera' means in aramic 'I create as I spoke'. So with the right combination of names of God you could do the miraculous. Apparently you would practice on something like a dove.

It occurred to me that you guys who are always working designing letters are doing something like the mystics did to reach the higher realm. Of course, this is all nonsense. But if I read later in the Inquirer that dead parokeets were mysteriously brought back to life near to the ATypi conference, I will know, I will know.

Actually, God was really pissed at Gutenburg for inventing type, and is still nostalgic for that whole Book of Kells thing. He will be at TypeCon to check out Just and Erik's bringing-type-to-life project, before He decides whether to zap them for copyright infringement.

>still nostalgic for that whole Book of Kells thing.

Kells Hrumph. A late coming pretender. But you are on to something. For the Torah to be Kosher, it must be hand written on parchment. And a scribe told me that the most difficult part is that he must inscribe every letter with an awareness of 'irat shamaim', the awe of heaven.He must feel God looking over his shoulder. It takes a year for a scribe to do the 5 books of Moses on the scroll. It is physically a pretty impressive thing - maybe even to a scoffer like you!

>> Interesting.

Coincidence? I don't think so.

Antoine Augereau (c. 1490

this is a dangerous arguement, if god had a font, surely he would need a computer too?

i don't think that anyone should get into the 'if god had a computer, would it be a pc or an apple mac?' argument....

There is no God and there is no perfect font.

Haha. Touch

Hey, a font of my own - that's a groovy idea
Maybe one of you could knock something up for me - and not just a font, how about a whole 'house style'
None of that old time crap though - something with a bit of zing. But not too designery either, I don't want any of that Design Republicy-Hilman Curtis-all mouth and no trousers type stuff

...it must be Arial