Tony Hirst is a lecturer in the OU’s Department of Communciation and Systems, and one of the OU's most prolific geeky tech bloggers at OUseful.info. Here he blogs about fonts, one of the subjects covered by Digital Planet, a new collaboration between the OU and the BBC Radio Science Unit on the World Service programme.

If you're a regular listener of the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet, you may have noticed that this week's episode was co-produced by The Open University (the programme is still available as a podcast, and to listen again, if you haven't had chance to catch it yet).

One of the topics discussed was typography and, in particular, font design... Now before you stop reading, have you ever wondered what's in a font - and how font selection can make a world of difference when it comes to communicating a message effectively? And have you ever thought how fonts may have their own personality types?

In Perception of Fonts: Perceived Personality Traits and Uses in Vol. 8 Issue 1 of Usability News from February 2006, A. Dawn Shaikh, Barbara S. Chaparro, and Doug Fox ran a study that seemed to suggest "that personality traits are indeed attributed to fonts based on their design family”. So, for example, Times New Roman is seen as formal, mature and conformist, whereas Comic Sans is seen as happy and, err, cuddly.

Although we are exposed to dozens of different fonts every day, both in print and on the screen, if you're anything like me you probably don't notice many of the features that distinguish one front from another. In the world of font-tasting, we'd go for the plonk. Font connoisseurs most of us aren't, at least, not consciously... So have you ever really looked at how a font is designed?

The Identifont quiz is a great way to start learning about how fonts are put together. Using a "20 questions" style approach, it helps you track down a particular font by leading you through a set of questions that get you to describe particular features of the font. And it's surprisingly accurate too.

And as with connoisseurs of fine wines and modern jazz (or whatever genre of music you favour), the font world has its own language with which to savour and design the features of different fonts. For example, did you know that a lower case letter g might have a loop, a descender, an ear and a lobe?

So if you want to learn more about the anatomy and structure of font faces, the articles Anatomy of a Character and Typeface Anatomy and Glossary both provide a vocabulary with which to talk about fonts; and by so doing, they help us see different font characteristics.

Maybe... (It just so happens that I'm a great believer in the rather unfashionable position that words give us "filters" or "lenses" that help us see more in the world, because they provide us with memorable labels that we can use as the basis for making distinctions about things. In a similar way, I believe that for every little bit more I learn about a subject, I can appreciate a little bit more the distinctions that are made within that subject. The same holds true for skills-based activities: it wasn’t until I learned how to juggle that I really started to appreciate the skill of a good juggler!)

So what's all this got to do with Digital Planet? Well, as I mentioned at the top of this post, our latest special episode co-production of the programme included a feature on font design... and in the spirit of the DIY theme of the programme, presenter Gareth Mitchell created his own font: Gareth New Roman. Here's what it looks like.

The font was created from Gareth's handwriting using this online service and you can download it from the Open2 website if you want to try it out. Somehow, though, I don't think that Identifont will be able to recognise it...