James Felici

James Felici has worked in the publishing industry—in both editorial and production—for more than 30 years. A veteran journalist and former managing editor of Publish magazine, he has set type by hand as well as on systems from IBM, Linotype, Compugraphic, CCI, and Magna. His books include The Complete Manual of Typography (Peachpit Press), The Desktop Style Guide (Bantam/ITC), How to Get Great Type Out of Your Computer (North Light), and contributions to The Macintosh Bible (Peachpit Press). He has written for numerous publications, including PC World, Macworld, and The Seybold Report, and has been a featured speaker at Seybold Seminars, Macworld Expo, and other events worldwide.
  • Features: Written by James Felici on May 1, 2013

    Because of your enthusiastic response to my last column, I’ve moved up its sequel. In this installment, I’ll be looking at display and decorative faces.

  • Features: Written by James Felici on April 3, 2013

    History is cruel to typefaces—especially text faces—and very few stand the test of time. For every Caslon or Garamond there are a hundred also-rans left along the road for reasons of taste, economics, or technology. The craving—and craze—for new faces has led to the revival of scores of old metal typefaces, but many deserving faces have been ignored. Here, I’d like to call attention to my top ten candidates for faces that ought to be available in digital form but aren’t. In a future column, I’ll train the same lens on display faces.

  • Features: Written by James Felici on March 6, 2013

    The last time I wrote about signage in the developing world (Go on a Type Safari, 4/1/10), I was roasted by some readers for failing to distinguish between setting type and hand lettering.

  • Features: Written by James Felici on February 6, 2013

    Certain keyboard shortcuts are universal across programs (and often platforms), and many of these have become second nature, just tripping off our fingers without a thought: Command/Ctrl-s to save, Command/Ctrl-c to copy, or Shift-Command-b (Mac) or Ctrl-b (Windows) to shift between bold and regular-weight faces. But while that automatic finger twitch produces predictable results for the first two of these, toggling into and out of bold can lead you to unexpected places.

  • Features: Written by James Felici on January 2, 2013

    It’s normally taken as an article of faith that you should use ligatures in text whenever you can. Like most articles of faith, though, this one too comes with an asterisk. In practice, the importance of ligatures is measured on a sliding scale from mandatory down to undesirable.

  • Features: Written by James Felici on December 5, 2012

    How a change in papermaking technology caused a revolution in type design, upsetting some delicate sensibilities in the process.

  • Features: Written by James Felici on November 7, 2012
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    It is perhaps the most abiding of today’s typographical conventions: indenting the first line of a paragraph.

  • Features: Written by James Felici on October 3, 2012
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    This story starts a few months back when a Creative Pro reader noted that using sans serif typefaces and adding an extra pixel of character spacing

  • Features: Written by James Felici on September 6, 2012

    The appearance of ascending and descending characters is largely an accident of history, but they now define the texture of what we find comfortable and easy to read.

  • Features: Written by James Felici on July 31, 2012
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    Frank Romano, Professor Emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology, recently quipped, “There are now over 200,000 typefaces, most of them ba

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