It was love at first sight. Subtle, gratifying curves. Long, pleasing lines. Mrs. Eaves had a kind of homely charm even when lying around the house. And when dressed up for a night on the town, she made people stop and stare. She was a natural beauty, and I was proud to be seen with her.

One of the most significant differences between graphic designers and other visual artists is our unhinged love of typography.

Mrs. Eaves is a typeface. One of the most significant differences between graphic designers and other visual artists is our unhinged love of typography. Our fervor for fonts creates among us an almost mystical communion. Like the time I walked through an outdoor market in Ukraine and overheard a woman bartering with a shopkeeper in English. She had a distinctive Tennessee accent—not unlike my own—and I knew I had found a friend. And so it is with graphic designers. Typography is our common language, and we enjoy our unique, if peculiar, dialect.

Mrs. Eaves, for instance, was designed by Zuzana Licko of Émigré as a reinterpretation of the Transitional classic, Baskerville. The classification Transitional describes typefaces designed in the 1700s between early Old Style and later Modern typography. John Baskerville’s typeface is the elegant apex of the genre, with extreme contrasts between thick and thin strokes. Mrs. Eaves borrows much from Baskerville, like the subtle diagonal stress and somewhat wider proportions.

What makes Mrs. Eaves distinct, however, is how the contrast of strokes has been ablated, causing the typeface to look as though it were printed on a letterpress. And so, while retaining its original refinement, Mrs. Eaves is also warm and approachable.

A more recent example of an Old Style font is Requiem, another typographic love of mine. The first generation of typefaces after Gutenberg invented movable type—which triggered the printing revolution of the 15th century—was based on handwritten letterforms. But with the Renaissance came a love of all things classical, especially typefaces whose capital letters were inspired by inscriptions on Roman monuments. Taking his cue from a 16th-century writing manual, Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler & Frere-Jones designed Requiem as a revival of these great letterforms.

Some 200 years later, the complete departure from calligraphic-based type design was accomplished with the advent of Modern typography. For me, the typeface designed by the Frenchman Firmin Didot is the supreme example. The exquisite letterforms of Didot have a completely vertical stress with flat and unbracketed serifs, and an even greater exaggeration of thick and thin strokes than those within Transitional typography.

For the type aficionado, these classifications are a kind of love language. But I’m not proud of all my infatuations. There was a day when I believed the sans serif Univers was a worthy rival to the unchaste Helvetica, who has been sharing her affections with every conceivable design problem for more than 50 years. Univers was designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1954 and has, in my view, a much more cohesive architecture. I love how the typeface was intentionally designed with the entire range of weights and styles in mind. Since those days, however, there has been a proliferation of sans serif type designs, many of which have inherently more personality than Univers, which now seems a bit stiff and dowdy. And yes, personality does matter. . . .

These days, I am enamored with a relative newcomer named Sentinel, also designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Although released in 2009, Sentinel represents a family of typography known as Egyptian (a misnomer because of the prevalent mania for all things Egyptian in the early 19th century). What differentiates this style of typography from other genres are the slab serifs, as well as a tendency for the strokes to be of uniform width. Whereas many fonts are subtle and elegant, Sentinel is bold and assertive, and comfortable in her own skin.

So for all of this amorous celebration of typography, the question remains: What difference does it make? What designers know instinctively is that typography—the diligent selection of typefaces and how they are displayed—can showcase a story or obfuscate it, enhance communication or hinder it. Moreover, well-designed typography becomes part of the words themselves, creating a sense of place and context in which to savor the story.

But at the end of the day, the renowned German typographer and designer Erik Spiekermann captures what most designers feel: “I can’t explain it; I just like looking at type. I just get a total kick out of it. Other people look at bottles of wine or whatever, or, you know, girls’ bottoms. I just get kicks out of looking at type. It’s a little worrying, I must admit.“