[dbonneville]

Hi - I'm the author of this article over at Smashing. Actually, this kind of scheme of describing typefaces is quite common, especially among the best designers on the planet. If you follow the references at the bottom of the article, you'd find a link to this article at H&FJ:

4 Techniques for Combining Fonts http://www.typography.com/email/2010_03/index.htm

I quote directly from the article:

"Here, three fonts with distinctive silhouettes have been chosen for their contrasting dispositions: the unabashed toughness of Tungsten is a foil for both Archer's sweetness, and the cheekiness of Gotham Rounded."

Really, there is no other way to talk about wines, or typefaces. It is subjective.

If you delve into the otherwise boring individual minutia of glyph characteristics and try to write an analysis comparing descenders of the lowercase "j" from 2 or 3 typefaces, you'd lose every reader before you got out of the starting gate.

That said, if you read the feedback, a lot of people said they learned something. My goal was to teach something and have the reader come away with a bit of knowledge, however incremental.