Eminence Font Trivia Quiz

Answer: Helvetica

"Helvetica" is a stalwart font, having been in use in essentially all media since its inception. One of its characteristics is that its capital letter "i" looks the same as its lowercase "L." By 1989, all the New York City subway signage had been redone with white Helvetica typeface on black backgrounds.

Answer: Geneva

In addition to Geneva, Susan Kare was responsible for some of the Mac's most famous original fonts, including bold Chicago, funky San Francisco, and slanted Los Angeles. Geneva is a sans-serif font, meaning it doesn't have little extensions that some fonts have.

A sans-serif capital "A," for example, would be two lines leaning against each other to a point, with a straight line connecting them in the middle. A serif "A" could have little flat feet along the bottom of the larger lines.

Answer: American Typewriter

"American Typewriter" is a specific kind of serif font, with bold serifs, or extensions. It resembles the type available on actual typewriters, only the width of the letters varies, a feature not available on traditional typewriters. It was designed in the 1970s at a design firm in New York. If you've ever seen the official "I (heart) NY" logo, then you've likely seen American Typewriter in action.

Answer: Times New Roman

Times New Roman became standard in both Windows and Apple operating systems in the early 1990s and is a core font for web sites and print materials of all styles. An interesting finding in 2008 was that within a sample population, more people considered materials written in Times New Roman funnier and angrier than identical materials printed in Arial.

Answer: Papyrus

Papyrus is named after the thick paper-like substance used as early as 400 BCE, but it was designed by Chris Costello in the early 1980s. He created it by using a calligraphy pen on textured paper, and the result is rough edges and high strokes in its capital letters that recall ancient writing.

In 2017, "Avatar" star Ryan Gosling acted in a spoof about his dissatisfaction with the movie's use of the font in its promotional materials. Costello admitted in a follow-up interview that even he thought the font was overused. Still, it has his own artistic style that works well with certain designs.

Answer: Bauhaus

Bauhaus was an art school founded in Weimar, Germany in 1919; one of its salient principles was that form and function should be one and the same. An example of a Bauhaus-style piece would be a set of simple, unadorned nesting tables: form and function together.

The font Bauhaus, with its design that mixes the curves of art with the boldness of function, is a good example of the eponymous movement.

Answer: Verdana

Verdana was designed by Matthew Carter and released by Microsoft in 1996. Carter was on a design team headed by Virginia Howlett, one of the company's original designers. Verdana is named after "verdant," which means green as in grass or vegetation, and "Ana," one of Howlett's daughters.

Its distinguished by the square dot over the lowercase "i," the serif on the top-left of its "Js," and its two-layer lowercase "a."

Answer: Bookman

Bookman first appeared in the mid 1800s in words by a Scottish publisher. A primary characteristic is its large, rounded lowercase letters. It gained quite a bit of prominence and influence when it was used in a 1930 printing of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," which corresponded with a movie based on the novel starring Jackie Coogan.

Answer: Courier

IBM created Courier for use in its industry standard typewriter, the IBM Selectric and never trademarked it, thereby making it accessible to an untold number of industries. Its creator, Howard "Bud" Kettler, was quoted on how he chose "Courier" over "Messenger" for this declarative typeface: "A letter can be just an ordinary messenger, or it can be the courier, which radiates dignity, prestige, and stability."

Answer: Chalkboard

Chalkboard font, found on Macs, is quite similar to Microsoft's Comic Sans, though they have some small differences. Chalkboard's number four is open on top, while Comic Sans' is closed, for example.