Colophon
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Colophon |
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Comic Sans
Comic Sans was designed by Vincent Connare at Microsoft in response to a need for fun fonts for Microsoft's new line of game titles. The font is intended to imitate the style of lettering used in newspaper comic strip speech balloons.
Comic Sans is used throughout the vanagon.com site in an attempt to convey the sense of fun that all Volkswagen owners know first hand.
Verdana
The font used for normal text on vanagon.com is Verdana, designed by world renowned type designer Matthew Carter, and hand-hinted by leading hinting expert, Monotype's Tom Rickner.
In its proportions and stroke weight, the Verdana family resembles sans serifs such as Frutiger, and Johnston's typeface for the London Underground. But to label Verdana a humanist face is to ignore the successful fusion of form and function Carter has achieved. This isn't merely a revival of classical elegance and savoir faire; this is type designed for the medium of screen.
The Verdana fonts are stripped of features redundant when applied to the screen. They exhibit new characteristics, derived from the pixel rather than the pen, the brush or the chisel. The balance between straight, curve and diagonal has been meticulously tuned to ensure that the pixel patterns at small sizes are pleasing, clear and legible. Commonly confused characters, such as the lowercase i j l, the upercase I J L and the number 1, have been carefully drawn for maximum individuality - an important characteristic of fonts designed for on-screen use. And the various weights have been designed to create sufficient contrast from one another ensuring, for example, that the bold font is heavy enough even at sizes as small as 8 ppem.
Matthew Carter
Matthew Carter co-founded Bitstream (the first digital type foundry) in 1981. At Bitstream, Matthew flourished, designing Galliard and 22 other type faces. One of Matthew's most well-known fonts is Bell Centennial, the font that is used in phone books. In 1991, Carter formed Carter & Cone with his partner Cherie Cone and turned his attention to special commissions, including the design of typefaces for Apple, Microsoft, and Wired, and Time magazine.
Get the Fonts!
The Verdana and Comic Sans fonts, as well as a number of other fonts designed for the web, may be downloaded from the Microsoft Typography pages
. The fonts are available for both Microsoft and Apple operating systems.