How Fonts Are Fueling the Culture Wars (backchannel.com)

Reader mirandakatz writes: Typography is having a bit of a moment: Suddenly, tons of people who don't work in design have all sorts of opinions about it, and are taking every opportunity to point out poor font choices and smaller design elements. But they're missing the bigger picture. As Medium designer Ben Hersh writes at Backchannel, typography isn't just catchy visuals: It can also be dangerous. As Hersh writes, 'Typography can silently influence: It can signify dangerous ideas, normalize dictatorships, and sever broken nations. In some cases it may be a matter of life and death. And it can do this as powerfully as the words it depicts.' Don't believe him? He's got ample visual examples to prove it.

Comments

Comic Sans

[lactose99]

Make everything Comic Sans, problem solved!

Re:Comic Sans

[ShanghaiBill]

According to my will, my obituary will be published in Comic Sans.
I love to annoy Font Nazis, and that will be my last opportunity.

Re:Comic Sans

[darkain]

That's okay, I plan to have mine published in Wingdings

Re:Comic Sans

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why everyone hates comic sans...

As with everything, it's Microsoft's fault. /s

In the mid/late 90s, the PC revolution meant that Microsoft Word became ubiquitous. Word made it easy to put together a "publication ready" document. Now, instead of having publishing software and tools in the hands of an elite group of users, steeped in the craft of typography, anyone with a computer could do it.

But Word didn't present these new users with any of the arcane knowledge of when to use which font that typography experts had. No one was teaching them the significance of serif versus sans serif. It didn't talk about the cultural implications of humanist typefaces. -- No, it just presented a simple drop-down box containing every font on the system, and left it to the user to pick one that they wanted, with little to no guidance.

Combined with this is the advent of the Internet for the masses, and particularly in Internet standardization. Comic Sans was one of the fonts picked as a standard web font -- and for good reason! It's very useful for short text in comic-like settings. That's what it was designed for - a font that could be used in dialog bubbles in computer-produced versions of things like Batman and Spiderman comics. The early web standardizers saw the use of such a font for various things on the internet, like info boxes and captions, etc. It wasn't intended as the main font on a primarily-text document, but if it wasn't included in the standard, you couldn't count on it for even the odd usage.

But all this consideration was lost on the users of Word - no one bothered to tell them what the intent of the font was, or give them any information or guidance in picking the font they want to use(1). Nope. Users were forced to randomly try fonts, and pick what they thought was best. And since they were (*sniff*) "the masses", they picked what they thought looked nice. All the esoteric considerations that knowledgeable typography experts apply are thrown out the window. And Comic Sans *does* look nice - in small doses (which is all you get when you have novices trying fonts out). Also, when compared to the other fonts you had available at the time, it stood out. (Let's be honest: from a high-level perspective, there's not much difference between Times New Roman and Garamond. You'd have to be a typography expert to explain in which situations you'd prefer one over the other.)

So a large number of people picked Comic Sans, thinking they were being sophisticated by not leaving Word to use the default typeface. This lead to the use of Comic Sans in a number of situations where it was just not done, according to the typography elite. It quickly became a way to separate those with typographical sophistication from the hoi polloi. We can all get together and laugh at the naiveté of those uncouth barbarians who pick Comic Sans. We all get behind a movement to Ban Comic Sans as a form of virtue signalling. Being against Comic Sans is not so much about having objections about the use of the font (which, don't get me wrong, there *are* valid reasons for), but about associating yourself with the type of people who are against the font (i.e. the literate, learned, cultured people who care about typefaces).

tl;dr - People hate Comic Sans because Microsoft eliminated the barrier to entry in publishing for people without typographical knowledge.

1) Heck, even today, with all the typography snobs running around, no one has really put together a good "so you know nothing about typography, but want to pick a font" guide -- well, except for the guides which are a one liner: "Use Helvetica."

Re:Comic Sans

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not funny, just pretentious.

Comic Sans has an actual use in the classroom for young readers and writers. It is the only font that has all of the following features at the same time:

a. It's widely available, installed on pretty much any computer some random Word or PowerPoint file might find itself.
b. The lower case "a" has a single loop and a small tail, the way it's usually taught for handwriting.
c. The lower case "g" has a single loop and a hook, the way it's usually taught for handwriting.
d. The "I" and "l" characters are easily distinguished (see what I did there?).
e. The "U" and "u" characters are easily distinguished.

Re:Comic Sans

[arth1]

It quickly became a way to separate those with typographical sophistication from the hoi polloi.

"The hoi polloi" is like saying "the La Brea tar pits" or "The big Rio Grande river".

Re:Comic Sans

[Anonymous Coward]

"The hoi polloi" is like saying "the La Brea tar pits" or "The big Rio Grande river".

Merriam Webster: "Even though hoi itself means "the", in English we almost always say "the hoi polloi". Or Oxford Dictionaries: "This knowledge has led some traditionalists to insist that hoi polloi should not be used in English with the, since that would be to state the word the twice. Such arguments miss the point: once established in English, expressions such as hoi polloi are treated as a fixed unit and are subject to the rules and conventions of English." Or even the venerable OED itself: "In English use normally preceded by the def. article even though hoi means ‘the’."

It's interesting that you saw a paragraph about intellectual elites finding things by which they can look down upon others, and your response is to post something that makes you appear intellectual and discriminating, but has no basis in reality.

Deeper Subject

[Thelasko]

I thought the article was going to be about how a capital "I" and a lowercase "L" look the same in some fonts and really messes up your code. I've had it happen before... Il

Re:Deeper Subject

[ShanghaiBill]

I thought the article was going to be about how a capital "I" and a lowercase "L" look the same

Even worse are the old people that learned to type on manual typewriters, and use a lowercase "L" instead of a one.

Offended by fonts now?

[cyberchondriac]

This article is just trashy, nothing to see here. So, everything with an old English/German font means "Nazi" now, does it? It couldn't possibly just reflect medieval culture, or Frankenstein, or Dracula, or harken back to any number of other things more mundane in the past several hundred years. Nope, it's Hitler. I guess, if you're really that shallow.
But nothing is more telling of the actual SJ undercurrent and intent of this article than these last few paragraphs, strangely comparing Clinton's and Trump's campaign logos:

Hillary Clinton ran for president with a slick logo befitting a Fortune 100 company. It had detractors, but I think we’ll remember it fondly as a symbol of what could have been—clarity, professionalism, and restraint.

Donald Trump countered with a garish baseball cap that looked like it had been designed in a Google Doc by the man himself. This proved to be an effective way of selling Trump’s unique brand.

I guess even fonts offend these people now. They're losing their minds.

Re:Offended by fonts now?

[Scarred Intellect]

I particularly liked

We take it for granted that we can type any word with a keyboard, but really, you should check your anglophone privilege.

Never mind the inconsistent voice and poor writing overall...

Re:Offended by fonts now?

[AthanasiusKircher]

And never mind it's mostly not even about fonts, but rather different language scripts. The vast majority of the article compares German blackletter (not so much English blackletter), Arabic, Cyrillic, Croatian, etc.

Yes, Arabic looks quite different from Germanic Fraktur and Russian Cyrillic. And...??

Different fonts (a.k.a. "typefaces" for the older crowd) are about things like x-height and whether you use serifs and proportional vs. monospace and descenders/ascenders and use of text vs. display weights. TFA doesn't seem concerned with most of that at all, instead focusing on completely different letterforms in different languages, which isn't really a font issue as much as a linguistic one. The only real typeface issues that are brought up at the end of the article contrast the bizarre abstract Hillary logo with the simple script used for "Make America Great Again!" for Trump hats. Except again -- that's really not much of a "font" issue (though yes, a font was chosen for each) as a complex typographical design difference. One is creating a weird logo vaguely based on a letterform; the other is an actual sentence that needs to be typeset in a recognizable script.

Broadly speaking, the article is somewhat about typography. But it isn't really about fonts, so I'm not sure what they're in the title at all.

are we still doing fonts then?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the world was moving to the use of emojis for all communication.

Re:Busted

[istartedi]

It was supposed to represent "moving forward". The irony of it pointing to the right wasn't lost on Bernie supporters. It also looked like a house that fell over between the Twin Towers.

Re:Reading way to far into buts of propaganda

[ShanghaiBill]

There was a recent article in the Economist about publishing in the Arab World. With the turmoil in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, Arabic publishing is dying. In Beirut bookstores, 40% of the books are in English, 40% in French, and only 20% in Arabic. Part of this is because Arabic is designed to be written by hand, and not printed. The shape of individual "letters" depends on the preceding and following "letters", much like English cursive, except even worse.

Re:Busted

[meta-monkey]

I don't know what to say about Trump's "logo" other than it was just a generic slogan, but maybe that said "genuine" to some people.

I liked Trump's slogan because it actually told you to do something. It immediately involves the listener in the process. You can respond by agreeing ("I would like to help Make America Great Again"), or by disagreeing ("I don't want to make America great again") or by rejecting the premise ("America already is/never was great"). But it contained a call to action that forces one to engage. Compare this to other slogans:

Clinton: "I'm With Her." There's no direct call to action there. There's no goal. There's no evaluation of the current situation or a possible future. It's empty.

Jill Stein: "It's in our hands." No shit. There's nothing to really disagree with there, but also nothing for you to do. There is no engagement.

Marco Rubio: "A New American Century." What the fuck does that mean, Marco? What am I supposed to do with the new American century?

Ted Cruz: "Reigniting the Promise of America." Well that sounds nice, but there's nothing to engage me or call me to action. Also it's passive. The "promise of America" sounds like asking what my country can do for me, not what I can do for my country.

Carly Fiorina: "New Possibilities. Real Leadership." Now that's generic and meaningless.

Jeb Bush: "Jeb!" Man, fuck you Jeb. Low energy.

So, I'd say Trump's slogan was far less generic than anybody else's, and at least it said something, and required the listener to evaluate the call to action and accept or reject it.

Handwriting?

[mcswell]

Handwriting? What's that?

BTW, SIL (an international missionary organization that does Bible translation) has produced many free fonts (you may even have heard of the "SIL Font License", which some other free fonts use). Because Bible translation is usually done for pre-literate or newly literate cultures, the Andika font (https://www.sil-lead.org/blog/2013/8/18/andika). I don't know how it compares with Comic Sans in your list of desiderata, though.

For the record, SIL produces a wide variety of other fonts, including Cyrillic, Greek and fonts for other non-Roman scripts (http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php). They're Beta testing a Nasta'liq font--if you know anything about Nasta'liq, you probably know that it's one of the hardest styles in the world to typeset. SIL (through a former member, Jonathan Kew) is also the creator of XeTeX (now maintained by others).

Re:Reading way to far into buts of propaganda

[mcswell]

That's what the early Arabic fonts did, but those who know Arabic well (I don't) tell me it didn't look good. And that's the Naskh style, which Arabic and many other languages that use Perso-Arabic script use. There's also the Nasta'liq style, which is still more calligraphic, and much harder to encode as a font. Urdu and Punjabi use Nasta'liq, and maybe others as well. (Persian used to.) Indeed, it wasn't long ago (a decade?) that some Urdu newspapers were written out by calligraphers before being printed by photo-offset. (I hope I have my terms right...)