DMK Designs

Are you an Arial person? A Times New Roman? A Garamond? A Lucida Handwriting? So much of our communication is expressed in text these days that people become deeply attached to the typeface they use to type out their thoughts. Bold or unbold, serif or sans-serif — like the car you drive or the clothes you wear, your font expresses who you are ... and can go in and out of style.

"Type, like fashion and music, comes in and out of vogue," Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type, tells NPR's Audie Cornish. So what's in right now? "I think now script fonts are making a comeback," he says.

Fonts didn't always hold such a significant spot in the cultural imagination. Before personal computers, type looked largely the same. "Everything basically looked like the typewriter font," Garfield says. "It was a liberating thing in the '80s" when it became possible to manipulate fonts with the click of a mouse.