When Spike Gjerde started to build a new restaurant in an old mill in Baltimore, he didn't want a slick menu printed with crisp, perfect letters. "We're all totally about salvage and reuse," he said. The menu had to reflect the restaurant's goal: presenting local ingredients in a roughhewn complex that once cast the meter-wide columns that support the dome of the U.S. Capitol.
So he turned to Mary Mashburn, a designer with an office filled with old type that was just a few blocks away. Mashburn set the restaurant's name, Woodberry Kitchen, with scratched and nicked wooden type from her collection of antique blocktypes and then printed a copy on her old letterpress. She then scanned the result into her computer, where she tweaked a few of the letters and adjusted a bit of the spacing.
A new version of an old font was born.
"The fact that the letters were distressed, it was real," Gjerde said.
Before the personal computer, most people were oblivious to fonts. Some may have recognized Courier and Elite underneath their noses on the IBM Selectric typewriter ball. But that changed when word-processing programs offered a hundred or more fonts from Arial to Wingdings. They found more in software packages and on the Internet.
Now, many people can recognize fonts by name. Indeed, a documentary about typography and one of the most familiar typefaces, "Helvetica," played to sell-out crowds at film festivals.
People like Gjerde are realizing that the thousands of fonts available on the Internet are not enough anymore. They can build custom fonts where all of the letters are not perfect duplicates of each other. They can mix in other fonts and then produce something that is uniquely suited for the job.
Good commercial and free software makes the job easier for a wide range of users. Some...

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