Nice Font You've Got There

I think I just had the most beautifully geeky experience of my life at Tim O'Reilly's keynote for the O'Reilly ETech Conference.

When the doors opened at 8:30, I wandered to an empty aisle seat in the middle of the auditorium, situated equally well for viewing, and for a fast exit. Within a minute or two, who should sit down next to me but Cory Doctorow? We'd not met before, but it turns out he's a really friendly guy, and we got to talking. Great! I get to talk to one of the big names here. The morning is starting off nicely.

As I opened up my editor to take notes for the keynote, and typed an intro line containing the subject of the talk and the date, Cory leaned over and said something to the effect of, "nice font you've got there." The font he was admiring was one I'd made for myself with the help of Fontifier. He then opened up a similar font on his machine. "That's a really good one," I said.

Font compliments exchanged, nothing was left to be done but wordlessly swap fonts. Without further talk on the matter, Cory whipped out a USB keychain drive, put his font on it, and handed it to me. I mounted the disk, installed his font, and copied my font to his disk before ejecting it and handing it back. He installed my font, took a peek at it in Font Book, and we both smiled.

I know some of you won't believe it, but I think this is the geekiest thing I've ever done. It certainly ranks in the top five.

Comments

[Jens Alfke]

Amazing! By the time you get back I expect you to be a card carrying member of the digirati.

[Tim]

... back in my prepress days, I considered myself quite the font geek. Seeing Zapf Chancery in all caps was usually enough to make me violently ill. If only I had a few more positive font experiences such as this ...

:)