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One the things I find most wonderful about type is that the typographer invests the sum of human experience into the tiniest, most trivial form. Never mind using tools and language, what makes us special is our ability to spend a lifetime reviewing the characteristics of a single letter-form (or indeed the characteristics of a single number).
The fonts in the Numbers series take their inspiration not from the history of printing types, but from other kinds of numbering familiar from the modern environment. Playing card numbers, instantly recognizable even out of context, have been revived as the Deuce typeface. The forms in the Greenback font are familiar from the U. S. dollar. Other fonts in the series draw inspiration from more distant sources, from vintage railroad cars to Soviet street signs.
The beautiful forms in the image above are from Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Trafalgar typeface.