It occurred to us recently that we’ve seen increasing instances of old-style figures (lowercase, non-lining numbers) in graphic design in the past few years. Typographers have always used text figures, but graphic designers have been largely ignorant of them owing, in part, to the lack of affordable extended font families in the early years of the desktop revolution.
Matthew Carter designed Georgia in 1996 for Microsoft’s Web Core Fonts program, and it’s now all over the internet. Why? Because it was included (wisely) in the system software for both Macs and PCs. Web designers use system fonts for all live type (type which has not been converted into a graphic) so that default fonts (think Courier) will not stand in as substitutes for specified fonts.
Georgia has handsome old-style figures, and this has renewed interest in non-lining numbers amongst designers.
Thank you Matthew Carter, and (dare I say it?) thank you Microsoft.
