We look at typefaces hundreds of times a day without giving them a second thought. But behind almost every one on this list is a genuinely wild backstory — secret scandals, broken friendships, a font dumped into a river, and even a country that never existed. Here are some of our favourite fun facts about fonts, gathered for anyone who (like us) gets a little too excited about typography.
When Type Designers Have Skeletons in the Closet
1. Eric Gill designed Gill Sans, one of the most recognisable typefaces of the 20th century: clean, humanist, and still used everywhere from book covers to branding. What’s less well known is that his own diaries, uncovered after his death, revealed deeply disturbing details about his private life, including incest and bestiality. Yikes!
2. Confusingly, Gill Sans often gets credited as the London Underground typeface — but it isn’t. That honour belongs to Johnston, designed by Edward Johnston in 1916. Gill Sans actually grew out of Johnston, because Johnston was Eric Gill’s teacher. Like teacher, like typeface.
A Font With a Body Count (Sort Of)
3. In 1916, printer T. J. Cobden-Sanderson fell out spectacularly with his Doves Press business partner, Emery Walker. Rather than hand over his share of their beautiful house typeface, Doves Type, Cobden-Sanderson spent months secretly hurling it piece by piece, over roughly 170 night-time trips, off Hammersmith Bridge into the River Thames. He believed he’d destroyed it for good. Almost a century later, mudlarks and a determinedtype designer recovered pieces of the original metal type from the riverbed andused them to help bring Doves Type back to life. Petty office politics: 1. TheThames: eventually, 0.
Switzerland’s Other Famous Export
4. Helvetica and Univers, two of the most influential typefaces ever created, were both designed in Switzerland in 1957. Helvetica’s name is a nod to “Helvetia,” the Latin name for Switzerland, though it was originally released under the far clunkier name Neue Haas Grotesk before being rebranded a few years later.
5. Helvetica is so ubiquitous that one graphic designer in New York reportedly tried to spend an entire day without seeing it anywhere. He failed almost immediately: it turned up on his clothes, his coffee cup, road signs, and shop fronts before he’d even left the house!
The Science of Type Is Weirder Than You’d Think
6. Typefaces can genuinely change the way things taste. Studies have found that round, soft typefaces make foods like jellybeans taste sweeter, while sharp, angular typefaces make the same food taste more sour. Your eyes, it turns out, are quietly talking to your tongue.
7. Something similar happens with effort. Researchers have found that people judge tasks as easier or harder based purely on how easy the instructions are to read. In one well-known study, people given an exercise plan or recipe set in a clean, legible font rated the task as quicker and simpler than people reading the exact same instructions in a fussy, hard-to-read font. So, the font on your flat-pack furniture instructions might genuinely be messing with your patience levels.
8. Road sign research has also shown that lowercase letters are easier to read at speed than blocky capitals — part of the reason most modern road signage favours mixed-case lettering over shouting in all caps.
Serif vs. Sans Serif: A Battle for the Ages
9. Sans serif typefaces (the ones without the little decorative “feet”) first appeared in print in the early 1800s. At the time, they were considered ugly and nicknamed “grotesques.” It took nearly a century, and the arrival of fonts like Helvetica, for sans serifs to be taken seriously.
Comic Sans: The Font Everyone Loves to Hate
10. Comic Sans was designed in 1994 by Vincent Connare for Microsoft Bob, a software intended to create a more child-friendly interface for the Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows NT operating systems. Connare explains:
“I booted [MicrosoftBob] up and out walked this cartoon dog, talking with a speech bubble in Times New Roman. Dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman! Conceptually, it made no sense.”
It escaped that narrow brief, ended up bundled with Windows, and was soon turning up everywhere it really shouldn’t: funeral notices, legal documents, even gravestones. A “Ban Comic Sans” campaign sprang up to save the world from itself. Ironically, its rounded, irregular letterforms are now recognised as genuinely helpful for readers with dyslexia, proving even the internet’s most-mocked font has its redeeming qualities.
IKEA’s Great Font Rebellion
11. In 2009, IKEA quietly swapped its long-standing typeface (a custom version of Futura) for the altogether plainer Verdana. This was a practical decision, led by the need to use a single typeface across all countries and languages.
The backlash was instant and global: design forums lit up, petitions were signed by the thousand, and the switch made international news. Few brand decisions have ever proven that typography fans take their fonts quite this seriously.
The Country That Never Existed
12. In 1977, The Guardian ran a seven-page April Fools’ supplement celebrating ten years of independence for “San Serriffe”, a fictional tropical archipelago shaped like a semicolon, somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Everything about the country, right down to its name, was a printing in-joke, and readers spent the day searching maps in vain for a place that simply wasn’t there.
A Few Numbers to Finish On
13. There are reckoned to be well over half a million fonts in existence today.
14. Helvetica alone is thought to account for several hours of most people’s daily reading without them ever clocking it.
15. The word “font” itself comes from the Old French fonte, meaning “to melt”: a throwback to the days when type was cast from molten metal.
Fonts are far more than just letters on a page: they carry history, science, and occasionally, scandal. At Jump, choosing the right typeface is something we take seriously (the print-friendly, sustainably-minded kind, not the river-dumping kind) for every project we work on. If you’re thinking about how typography could work harder for your brand, get in touch — we’d love to talk fonts with you.
