At the Vapriikki Museum Center, an interesting exhibition on typography has just ended. The exhibition was designed by Markus Itkonen, and it used fifteen information panels to explore and discuss typography. The word typography comes from Greek: typos ‘general form, character; outline’ andgraphein ‘to write’. In the past, letters were painstakingly cut from wood or metal, so fonts were few, but in the digital era we have nearly 200 000. Upper case letters emerged in first century Rome, and the Trajan typeface, for example, faithfully mimics inscriptions of Roman monuments. Lower case letters appeared much later, in the ninth century. Letter types have changed not only because of printing technologies but also because of the needs of society: in the 1970s designers developed typefaces for airports (Frutiger) and road signs (Transport), aiming for them to be easily read from a distance. The proliferation of printers in the 1980s required fonts without fine detail or thin arcs. On current digital displays, readers have to be able to recognize small, pixelated letters, and for this need fonts like Verdana have been developed. According to the exhibition, the permanent favorites of professionals are Helvetica, Garamond and Frutiger, while Comic Sans and Times are the fonts they love to hate.