Bold & Justified: The Typographic Universe in One Infographic

I don't know if FontShop's very own Communications Manager and TYPO SF co-organizer FontShop fan video this is the second consecutive post discussing the work of a Meghan. Last month the COLOURlovers website published a rather impressive infographic about typography titled Bold & Justified. The goal of the infographic was to start the conversation about how large and interesting the world of fonts is within the COLOURlovers community, many of whom are not designers. It was designed by Meghan Robichaud, a graphic designer and illustrator from New Brunswick, Canada, currently living in Vancouver. This graduate of the Art Institute of Vancouver's Graphic Design program works as a freelance designer and illustrator, and has been featured in AdWeek's Talent Gallery, Most Creative Resumes, and Toy Design Served.

Detail of the Bold & Justified infographic.

The infographic is concise yet comprehensive, its subject matter ranging from the essential to the anecdotal. It covers typographic evolution and type classification, typographic anatomy, statistics, type styles and family names, geography, system fonts and webfonts, and the cost of digital type. Meghan's research into typography made her discover many things. She explains that sourcing the content was more difficult then she expected – most of the font foundries/resellers do not post their statistics anywhere, and since there were duplicates of a lot of fonts across the resellers, it wasn't possible to just add them all together to get the total number of fonts available on the web. She ended up deciding that the font resellers with the largest font collections were sufficiently large sample sizes to make assumptions about the type available on the web, and was able to piece a lot of information together that way.

Unfortunately, as Meghan only had a week to create the entire infographic, it is marred by a couple of errors. She regrets that despite a lot of spell checking and extra sets of eyes, there are some embarrassing typos (Bidoni instead of Bodon, Calson instead of Caslon…). However I applaud her effort in designing such a sprawling infographic that manages to be informative on an entry level without becoming overwhelming.

To design the infographic Meghan used the skyline sans Steelfish, Dan Rhatigan's low-contrast slab serif webfont Copse, Numbers, the classics Baskerville and Helvetica, the script-inspired sans serif Amaranth (which reminds me of Bree) and superstar designer / illustrator / letterer Jessica Hische's curly script Buttermilk.