A Note on the Type
Often on the final page of a book you'll find a 'Note on the Type' that provides a quick history of the typeface used in the preceding pages. It usually consists of phrases such as "this book is set in Goudy Old Style, designed by Frederic W. Goudy in 1915. Notable for the diamond-shaped dots on punctuation marks, Goudy Old Style is one of the most popular typefaces ever produced." Though sometimes interesting, The New Yorker likened readers of 'Notes on the Type' to those who refuse to leave the movie theatre until the final credit rolls by. "Who cares," they asked, "what typeface this book was set in except for a handful of ink-stained, pica-crazed designers with floppy metal rulers?"
Pica-crazed or not, you may be interested in the story behind this website's type: davidkopulos.com is set in a typeface called Arial, which is familiar to most computer users and reviled by most designers. It was designed in 1982 as an imitation of Helvetica, the ubiquitous typeface used in the logos for American Airlines, Toyota, Panasonic, Mattel, Staples, Jeep, Evian water, Lufthansa, and Target, to name just a few. Arial's ubiquity (it is pre-installed on almost all new computers) has made it one of the most common fonts on websites and printed documents, but most designers see it as a poor knock-off of Helvetica: the font used by those who don't know any better.
Excepting the portfolio pieces themselves, Arial is the only font you'll find on this website. Given its lowly status in the design world -- second only to Comic Sans as a target of derision -- an explanation for its use is in order. Apart from the challenge of creating a satisfying design with a font as unassuming as Arial, its use here could be considered a statement about the nature of design itself: fancy tools are less important than a good eye.
A note on the Note
I've used the term "typeface" where "font" might seem to make more sense. Technically, Arial is a typeface, whereas '12-point Arial Bold' is a font. The term is less relevant in the computer age, but when printing required each metal character to be hand-placed in a row to form a sentence, there indeed were separate drawers of fonts for each point size and variation like bold and italic, and the sum of those fonts was the typeface.