Fonts

As you can see, I can't think of a clever, or punning, title today. I was riffing around "Font Of All Wisdom" but couldn't come up with anything that made sense, and wasn't rubbish.

So here it is: a blog post about fonts. Not fonts as in the ornate troughs that babies are baptised over, but typefaces - the designs and styles of letters. You may think there's not much to say about them, that they're of little interest. But if you think that you're wrong. Fonts are absolutely brilliant, and I'm going to try and explain why. Buckle up: this could get thrilling.

What this won't be is an education on the technicalities of fonts. The reason for this is that, first, that really would be boring, and second, I don't know much about them. I know what a serif is (the twiddle that finishes off some letters in some fonts, including this one), but that's the limit of my knowledge. Rather, then, I'll tell you what I think makes fonts so interesting, and tell you about some of my most, and least, favourite ones.

So why are fonts so good? For me, the reason lies in how evocative they can be. They add another layer to the miracle that is the written word. With a particular font, not only do our brains link a random collection of ink marks or pixels (a word) to a far-removed concept (the meaning), they also attach a feeling.

Consider the picture below, which shows the same word in two different fonts:

Without me having to tell you, your mind knows that the top version means "chilling", as in "frightening", while the bottom one means "chilling", as in "relaxing". To me that is bloody amazing.

The other thing fonts do well is capture the essence of a time. You only need to look at the font below

and you picture an advert from a 1950s newspaper (please forgive the text in the above example: for those that don't know, it's a reference to a Harry Enfield sketch - I'm not sexist, it just seemed to fit the font!).

Or how about this?

Again, I suppose the word itself is leading your thoughts a little, but I can't believe I'm the only person who thinks that font has something of an '80s vibe.

So that, briefly, is why I love fonts. Now for two of my favourites, and one that I hate.

As you can see, this font isn't chosen for its distinctiveness or beauty. Instead I like it because it reminds me of boyhood dreams of being an FBI Agent. It is, forever, the "X Files Font". Not the font of the opening title sequence, but the font that Mulder and Scully's once futuristic, now primitive computers displayed when they were typing up their case notes. To my young eyes, Courier New was the closest-matching font available on Windows 98, and so I used it to type up my own "case notes" (homework).

I have loved it ever since, and always will.

A more contoversial choice, I know. I don't love this font. But seeing it is always a usefully chastening experience for me. Allow me to explain:

I have, as you can tell, always been a font-o-phile. And in my early secondary school years Comic Sans was all the rage. As such, I considered all users of it to be unimaginative Luddites. If you're a regular reader of my blog, then you'll know that I look back on almost everything I do with regret (see link). And so I only have to look at Comic Sans and I'm overcome by a wave of shame about the snob I used to be.

But this snobbery exists beyond my mind too (as this article attests), and so I also like Comic Sans for its success amid derision. It's the Bolton Wanderers of the font world.

And now for a font I hate. You see, to me Papyrus is for people who think they're a cut above. Stop and look for a moment, and you'll find Papyrus on many restaurant menus, shop signs or vans of self-styled artisans. It's crushingly unoriginal.

But worse than all of that, it undermines my previous argument about Comic Sans and shows me to be a complete hypocrite who doesn't learn from his mistakes, and is just as much a snob as before.

I loathe the person I've re-become...