It will only be a matter of time before the person making sure there's coffee in the morning, or the cleaners who come in on the weekend, will receive credit. All of this, I believe, is a good thing. Comprehensive credit listings function both as a nice gesture to thank the people involved in the realization of a design, and they inform us, to an extend, about how a design was created. With a few exceptions, the bulk of the design annuals published today do not list what is often one of the most significant building blocks of any design, namely the typeface and, by extension, the typeface designer. This one piece of software, the font, that can contribute the most to the look and feel of a design, is usually not mentioned, even in cases when type is the only visual ingredient of a design.
Type designers invest their artistic skills in their creations.
And while most design professionals regard type design as a valuable, creative activity, it has suffered in the public eye because of a lack of recognition. The anonymity of typeface origins and their designers is an unfortunate situation that has become increasingly detrimental to the field of typeface design. Before the democratization of type, which resulted from the introduction of personal computer technology, just over a decade ago, there existed an established collection of typefaces and foundries that were familiar to graphic designers, typesetters, and others who worked with type. The introduction of new typefaces in those days was a slow process that allowed ample time for the type community to become accustomed to the new designs. Because everyone in the industry could identify typefaces, graphic designers and typesetters had grown accustomed to leaving out credits for the typeface names or typeface designers.