I Am Officially a Typography Nerd
I bought The Elements of Typography and Thinking With Type for personal use. I went to a screening of Helvetica and a Q&A with the filmmaker. I nearly wet myself when I received a CD of Adobe fonts as a gift. And when Dan needed to figure out what the font was on Danny Ocean’s business card, I took a glance and responded confidently that it was Copperplate.
But I was not yet a type nerd. Not officially.
No, the confirmation came as I read of Armin Vit’s struggle with Copperplate. One sentence took me back to a moment in the car with Gen and Tony during our recent trip in Seattle, the moment when I looked at a store’s sign and said, as if uttering a prophecy, “Papyrus is the new Comic Sans.”
The sentence that took me back to this moment was this:
Copperplate Gothic’s default ubiquity and, by consequence, broad misuse, has procured it a place among The Designers’ Holy Hatred Font pantheon reigned by Papyrus and Comic Sans
When you are led to the Holy Hatred Font pantheon as if by a sneering angel, then, my friends, you are an official type nerd.
2 Comments so far
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I’ve been an enemy of copperplate for a long time now, the worst is when people use it for numbers… Personally I think Impact is far worse than Papyrus could ever hope to be…
By tony on 09.07.07 9:31 am
[...] All of that said, I have a certain respect for those who go all-out and just call themselves design police. Encouraging others to “bring bad design to justice,” the site offers a number of templates for stickers and labels that one could affix to bad design: “kern this,” “do not use faux bold,” “Microsoft Word™ is not a design tool,” and “consult a graphic designer,” among others. Actually, while some of these seem kind of vague and less than constructive (”this has no personality,” “severe lack of creativity”), I must admit that others reflect stuff I’ve complained/blogged about myself (”Awful library stock photo,” “Comic Sans is illegal“). [...]
By doombot » Uh oh! It’s the Design Police! on 01.17.08 2:25 pm
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