Discussion

By Joe Treacy on Sep 15, 2023

1985 - 1995 was such an exciting time, filled with so many changes. DARPA turned over DARPANET to the public, creating the internet.

Mr Berners-Lee took HTML from SGML (similar to the phototypesetting language you mention), and boom!

Of course, we all had to suffer through dialup modem service, early AOL and CompuServe, no “web design” software, then early software, and exorbitantly priced web development services in order to reach today.

But really good things, such as remote proofing, also grew out of the transformative period.

(And Frank putting Treacyfaces on the front cover of his indispensable publication TypeWorld in 1987 was amazing, as he relentlessly, singlehandedly tracked the changes and growth potential of the type industry through the changing times. Frank, thank you for seeing that instead of launching yet another copycat font foundry, my approach really was and is different, fully leveraging the new technologies in ways that no one else was. He mentions this along with how my award-winning, ubiquitous TFForever®? type family, on page 166 of his voluminous “The Story of Desktop Publishing”, ISBN 978-1-58456-381-5. One of his 80+ books!)

I really do still miss all the many expert regional typographers who i loved working with over the previous decades, whose businesses didn’t survive the endless onslaught of change. I loved you all, truly, and thank you for your great composing work during the metal and photo years, that got my clients and I through.

I, for one, am very grateful to Mr Berner-Lee, and to the Desktop Publishers Forum on compuServe, where my company Treacyfaces, which had been selling fonts since the late ‘70s, sold its first fonts over the Web in the visionary DTP Forum in 1993.

And to a friend of mine who in early 1995 told me that “I should get a website”.

He was right, because within literally five hours of Treacyfaces.com launching in 1996, our online original and custom fonts sales took off, reaching avid customers around the world that I could not have reached and excited to buy, otherwise.

After the earlier decades of closed-technology font production systems, I and other type designers were able to break free and take our font designs directly to our public, speaking designer to designer, never looking back.