vee have vays of making you type

(With apologies to all you Germans out there.)

Well, here we are approaching the end of this series. It doesn't seem as though I've been posting fonts more than twice a month, but I must have speeded up somewhere along the line as I shouldn't be reaching Z until November. Maybe X will stop me in my tracks: we'll just have to wait and see.

But here we are at V, and first up is Van Dijck - which, you may be surprised to hear, wasn't designed by the man with the strange 'cockerney' accent who starred in Mary Poppins. Instead it was Christoffel van Dijck, one of the great 17th-century Dutch typefounders, who gave the font its name. Though this modern version of the font may not have been cut by him, it is nevertheless representative of the best designs from the 1600s, and was drawn at Monotype under the supervision of Jan van Krimpen. However, Van Dijck Italic, for which original punches survive, is almost certainly the work of van Dijck himself.

And in complete contrast, next up is Verdana. It's perhaps a given that this series is really all about type that has been designed for the printed page: that's something that can't be avoided. But if I were to be compiling this list at the beginning of the 22nd century, it would be interesting to see how many of them might be fonts that had been specifically designed for reading on screen. And whether Verdana would still be there.

Designed by Matthew Carter, and released in 1996, Verdana was bundled with subsequent versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system, as well as their Office and Internet Explorer software on both Windows and Mac OS. In addition, it was long available for download from Microsoft's web site allowing it to be used by any system supporting TrueType fonts. As a result, it is now installed on most desktop computers.