I remember back at the end of the ’80s when I was just starting high school and our biology class incorporated computers into our daily learning process. We had those bulky one piece Macs with a monochrome screen on them. It was the first time any of us really came into contact with fonts and an interface where you could type documents and print them. It was one of those “holy shit!” moments for me that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. We ended up using them quite a lot, but never for the stuff that I really wanted to do, which was to check out the OS more thoroughly to learn what it was capable of. We were pretty much just allowed to use them for typing our school assignments.
Back then, the fonts weren’t really that advanced even though they were beautiful to look at. There were like 10-12 of them available, and that was about it. Today there are obviously a lot more available than that, A LOT MORE! There are over a hundred thousand fonts that we are able to use, and they are all there to help us make our stuff look better. I recently stumbled over one of the most (if not THE most) intricate fonts (or typefaces) I have ever seen. I know it sounds uneducated to just say font when you really mean typeface and vice versa. However, most people don’t talk the design language, and they only refer to different types of fonts as… well, fonts.
The world’s most intricate typeface must be the Mekkanika typeface, and it’s more than insane. The detail of it is mind boggling, and I can’t imagine the process of putting this set together and how long it must have taken to do so. It’s another one of my “holy shit!” moments as a designer to see something this intricate become a true typeface font for people to actually use. Usually they are just a logo or an image created with a few letters, but this is the entire alphabet, character by character. If you ever want a moment of pure wonderment, this could be it, from a designer’s perspective that is. This typeface is created by talented designer and I guess, typefacer, Riccardo Sabatini. Huge props!
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