Font fans may be typecast, but they love it

It is perhaps a slight exaggeration to say fonts are Vanessa Dina's life. But she often chooses the typefaces for books in her role as design director for the San Francisco independent publisher Chronicle Books (not affiliated with The Chronicle) and speaks about fonts as if they were people with distinct character traits. Her recent book-design projects include "Tartine Breads" - "I used Tribute and clean, classic Benton Sans" - and "Whoopie Pies" - "I chose more whimsical fonts like Blockhead and Bodoni Egyptian."

She doesn't leave the fonts at the office, though. On the walls of the graphic designer's airy Mission apartment are many items centered on type - collections of retro ads, luggage stickers and colorful Muni monthly passes along with framed old Letraset alphabets and numerals - the sort that designers like her used for print before computers. "I've been going to flea markets and tag sales for as long as I can remember, picking up vintage and retro pieces with old fonts on them."

Another font enthusiast, Stephen Coles, formerly worked at one of the world's leading suppliers of typography to designers, San Francisco's Font Shop, and now runs a popular website about fonts, Typographica ( www.typographica.org). In a thrift shop in Berkeley, he recently found letters from an old commercial sign that he's arranged on a shelf in his Oakland apartment to spell the word "SURE."

"All the type nerds I know - and there are now a lot of them - have collected some letters or graphics with interesting type on them."

Just call it type fever

But it's not just type nerds and graphic design professionals who are lettering up their interiors. "We can't meet the demand for the old, beat-up sign letters and weathered advertisements," says Wayne Whelan, co-owner of the retro furniture store Therapy in San Francisco.

An interest in fonts has lately gone mainstream, getting its start for many when they first morphed a document's text from Times New Roman to Courier to Georgia. A new book, "Just My Type" (Profile Books; 2010), by Simon Garfield, analyzes the growing public fascination with fonts, while the 2007 film "Helvetica," which documented that font's rise from its mid-20th century invention to world domination, was a hit on the festival circuit.

At San Francisco's interiors stores, many objects feature type these days. At Jonathan Adler, there are throw pillows with the Seven Deadly Sins and assorted city names embroidered in funky fonts on them, while Anthropologie and Zinc Details both carry lines of hang-up letters, especially popular, the staffs say, for personalizing nurseries. The old furniture stores up and down Valencia Street offer many tools associated with making type before the advent of computers: Hemingway-era typewriters, retro rubber stamp and letterpress kits. Therapy recently had for sale a mirror with old typewriter and adding machine keys as its border.

Of course, this isn't wholly a new trend - TV's Mary Tyler Moore famously had an "M" hanging on a wall of her apartment - but type has come to seem somehow more natural as a backdrop in our personal spaces. Local graphic designer-turned-interior designer Brian Dittmar says, "We're so inundated with words in all our waking hours, with texting, e-mails, time spent on the Internet. Text is our landscape."

At home with fonts

At last spring's San Francisco Decorator Showcase, Dittmar had text embroidered into a rug and etched onto a mirror in the room he designed. "It's so easy and inexpensive to do. I laid out the text on the computer, and my rug and mirror designers produced them for low cost, something new technologies make possible."