Why?
     

The web offers more than 60,000 fonts. The quantum leap from photo-typesetting to desk top publishing saw the small group of diligent, knowledgeable, gifted and mostly distinguished type artists mushroom to a huge army of largely unknown typographers and ad hoc designers, who now have access to many font creation tools, thanks to the universality of PostScript type 1 and truetype software.
Albrecht Dürer showed in his famous treatise how to make shapes by using a compass and a ruler. But these are obsolete, as today's fonts are made with a mouse, Fontographer, a large screen, a lot of élan, while little respect is shown for the heritage of the ancestors, from Gutenberg to Gerstner. On the contrary, the exemplary fonts created by these artists during several centuries have been trashed by many of the new font designers. They destroyed and reconstructed the alphabets, and created new characters. This is the way in which the first worldwide font lab was set up, on thousands of computer desks at once, and across all continents and skin colors. We have virtually no reason to add more typefaces to the legions of professionally designed high-quality alphabets.

Unless we agree with Adrian Frutiger, who was once asked "Why are there so many typefaces?" His reply:
"It is the same as with the wine. Actually one needs only one good kind. But when I
enjoy a fine dinner in a good restaurant, and the owner shows to me a big wine list,

  

then it's nice to have a good selection and to discover an unknown, surprising new taste."
If there wasn't this freedom of choice, then we would have an industrial standard typeface such as DIN, and we would all wear the same grey dresses, and watch the same grey faces live their monotonous lifes.

In 1986 I participated in a graphic design meeting held by the Stempel foundry, now a branch of Linotype. The boss was surprised by the colorful typography shown by the performer, Erik Spiekermann, because at that time typography was still a "black art". I learned this trade in 1947 with the T-square, just like Gutenberg and his followers. The desktop computer thus has democratized this specialty. Today everybody can design and discover, regardless of previous knowledge.

This is the time to develop and discover typography and to get on with design and communication using our alphabet. We need projects and ideas that use type, lines, print or web pages, to act as eye-catchers and essential images. It is a matter of trying the unexpected and inviting surprises just as with wine tasting. That is why typOasis is starting the Playground project. Everybody is invited to join in and to contribute something to its success. Suggestions and ideas are always welcome. Long live the black, colored art, and all type, the components of the visual communication.
 
 translation by Luc, thank you!  
introductory text by Manfred Klein