I think this is precisely Justine’s point. What I took from this post is that when she writes on her computer screen, which will be read primarily by her, she doesn’t care what font she uses. Some of us waste time picking a pretty (yet still readable) font, instead of using that time to actually write in the font.

When the work is published, of course the font is important. That’s why professionals who work at the publisher’s make those decisions. (Actually, I don’t know for sure, since I haven’t sold any books yet, but I doubt they tell the author, “Hey, here, pick a font!”)

I care about typefaces not only because I’m a visual person, but because every single person who reads what I write has to digest that information visually (excepting screen readers or reading aloud).

It wouldn’t take an enormous amount of time to research basic typography. I would have thought writers would be interested in typography since your work depends on it.

In fact, there is probably no more important human innovation that contributes to writing than typography. A good typeface is legible, and without typography, your book would be pages upon pages of hard-to-read gibberish.

Also, Optima is a fine humanist typeface designed by Hermann Zapf in the 50s. It was meant to be a compromise between rigid modern san-serifs like Futura and serifs like Times. I imagine a book set in Optima would be pleasant to read.

Which is interesting because I am of all things not a “visual thinker” — I am incapable of picturing things in my head at all.

I am also into paper and pens (specifically, Staedtler Tri-plus fineliners), though less so than in my younger, pre-computer days…

as long as we’re all talking about good/bad fonts: i really don’t like courier and am not terribly fond of helvetica either. (boring!) my favorite font so far is century gothic. love! for writing, i like optima and times new roman. unless i’m writing an essay, in which case ARIAL IS YOUR FRIEND. mwahahahaha.

The extent of my caring is that I prefer sans serif fonts to serif fonts. Other than that, it’s more about software freedom than aesthetics for me.

As a point of contention though, I don’t like Helvetica that much and prefer to use Univers as my default sans-serif. Although I can’t debate the historical significance of Helvetica.

For the end user, if they see the font, the designer hasn’t done their job. But for us designers, oh yes, the font is the thing (well, actually the use of the font, that the color is correct, that it balances and reads well). A well designed page with an excellent use of fonts and type can get us very excited indeed.

There was an interesting article in the early-90s that contrasted the writing of Mac-users vs. PC-users (pre Windows). Basically Mac users were more concerned with sentence length and paragraph appearance, while PC users concentrated on the actual content they were writing. At the time, PC users and those submitting typewritten papers had 10-15% higher marks than the Mac users, though their papers weren’t as pretty.

That’s what I do anyway.

Lot of authors yearn to write a novel on an old typewriter to get the feel of how those old timey writers did it.

I posit that the font you chose can have a similar effect. Perhaps if you like listening to music to set your mood you might want to chose a font that better reflect the type of mood you are trying to give. Some fonts are contemporary and some classic. Some are airy and light while some are dark and foreboding.

I’m not saying it will get you any different results but enough authors seem to talk about setting up the experience of writing that it must have some effect for some people.

Reading is another story though. I don’t much care for one font over another. I actually think i prefer reading verdana or trebuchet ms.

Eh.

And guess what. As i type this i’m drinking coffee and it’s FOUL and i feel miserable (i ran out of chai.) I’m so close to quitting i swear.

I think you made the right choice, though. Even for people who like fonts, Helvetica was supposed to be dreadfully boring.

I’ll still write how I prefer, but format before I submit. I think it’s a nice compromise.

Beyond that, though, I have to admit that I don’t really care. I suspect this isn’t that different from your position. You actually do care about fonts – it’s just that the set of fonts that do not annoy you is larger than the set that doesn’t annoy me.

Having said that, though, I have to say that I can waste a _lot_ of time trying to get a good-looking font in whatever text editor I’m using. So maybe I’m a little more high-strung about it than you are… :’)

For that matter, most proofreaders I know can’t function without Courier or some other fixed-width font; they need that sameness of width to supplement their ability to visually recognize the rightness or wrongness of a word on the page. (So that you can tell, just at a glance, that “the” is three chars long, not two and not four, because all the chars are the same width.)

I also ran across one proofreader who holds ms. pages up to the light, one version on top of another, to tell what changes have been made. That’s much harder to do with a variable-width font; one additional capital M and you won’t be able to lay the two pages over each other comprehensibly.