Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
Speaker 1: for tuning in. Let's give it up for the one
Speaker 1: and only super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2: Shut up, Noel.
Speaker 1: What's your favorite font?
Speaker 2: Oh? Papyrus obviously, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. If someone asked me, Ben, what's your favorite font,
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you I would not have a good
Speaker 1: answer I have. We both have a lot of very
Speaker 1: accomplished graphic design friends, and I think all three of
Speaker 1: us right, and graphic designers are pretty sensitive about fonts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Seraphs. No seraphs, you know, my god,
Speaker 2: don't even get me started on turning. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I briefly sort of had a dalliance working in a
Speaker 3: graphic design company doing video stuff, and that's when I
Speaker 3: learned terms like like kerning and seraphs. I was just
Speaker 3: mainly taking elements that the actual graphic designers did and
Speaker 3: then converting them into like after effects animations. You know,
Speaker 3: we're text on screen for video type stuff. But anytime
Speaker 3: I made any adjustments to things like kerning in the
Speaker 3: design they sent me, for whatever reason, they clocked it instantly.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they got a spidery sense for me. And
Speaker 1: there needs to be some sort of discipline right for
Speaker 1: this conveyance of information. Look, no matter what language you speak,
Speaker 1: no matter where you live, in this wide world of ours,
Speaker 1: you are constantly inundated by type, by letters, by messages,
Speaker 1: by communication from some other thing to you. We played
Speaker 1: a dangerous and a weird game that max you would
Speaker 1: love back on stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1: We're talking about insidious patterns of advertising. And this was
Speaker 1: a number of years ago. We tried to count how
Speaker 1: many ads we saw in twenty four hours. Everyone trying
Speaker 1: to play this game lost count.
Speaker 2: No one won.
Speaker 1: There are just too many type is everywhere.
Speaker 3: And that speaks to some of the tricksy methods that
Speaker 3: go into type setting. I use that as kind of
Speaker 3: an outdated term. Perhaps a font would be more the
Speaker 3: proper term now in the era of kind of digital
Speaker 3: graph design. But in the old days it was called
Speaker 3: a type set because it was literally a set of
Speaker 3: metal letters that were used on a printing press. You know,
Speaker 3: for every single letter that there was a type setter
Speaker 3: who had to go in and place those puzzle pieces in,
Speaker 3: you know, for every single page of a publication. Right,
Speaker 3: But you know, when we're seeing advertisements that make creative
Speaker 3: use of fonts, we always come back to Chick fil A.
Speaker 2: You know, think what you will up?
Speaker 3: Their politics whatever their ad campaigns are on point because
Speaker 3: they capitalize out a phenomenon that I believe is called disfluency,
Speaker 3: where because of their whole misspelling and kind of childlike
Speaker 3: handwritten signs, your eyes linger on it longer because it's
Speaker 3: sort of a puzzle to solve.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, just so in the world of Chick fil A,
Speaker 1: cows want you to focus your genocidal tendencies on chickens, right,
Speaker 1: and so okay, this type is everywhere. Font or typeface
Speaker 1: is a crucial part of how we encounter information when
Speaker 1: we read it. And if you think back now, just
Speaker 1: through your day before you tuned in to this episode,
Speaker 1: you will have probably seen multiple different fonts in one
Speaker 1: instance or another, and they do affect us psychologically. But
Speaker 1: we rarely ask where these fonts came from. What's the providence,
Speaker 1: what's their origin story? This is a question that has
Speaker 1: haunted our good friend and research associate, Jeff Bartlett. So, Jeff,
Speaker 1: this one's this one's for you. He went to the
Speaker 1: mat on this. He's in the trenches with us, Sarah
Speaker 1: or Sands. This is a two part episode.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we're not just talking about the providence of
Speaker 3: every run of the mill type font. We're specifically talking
Speaker 3: about fonts that have gotten, for better or worse, a bad.
Speaker 2: Reputation, you know, whether from a.
Speaker 3: Design perspective, a legibility perspective, or just kind of a
Speaker 3: bad taste perspective.
Speaker 2: So we were talking off air.
Speaker 3: The original title of this was stupid fucking fonts Lead
Speaker 3: me on that Max, but it changed, you know, because
Speaker 3: it's a family show to the fonts we love to hate.
Speaker 3: And I was joking when I said Papyrus. There's a
Speaker 3: really great that is, you know, among some of the
Speaker 3: one of the most hated fonts out there. And there's
Speaker 3: an amazing sketch or like a digital short on SNL
Speaker 3: with Ryan Gosling where he comes to the realization that
Speaker 3: the logo for the multi gazillion dollar grossing film Avatar
Speaker 3: from James Cameron. The text is literally just papyrus, which
Speaker 3: is kind of this, you know, it's meant to evoke feelings,
Speaker 3: I guess of like mystical ancient Egyptian tombs.
Speaker 1: It doesn't even really do to feel like you're reading
Speaker 1: a scroll. Yeah, all right, yeah, early early nineties video
Speaker 1: games loved it. Lots lots of blogs in the two
Speaker 1: thousands loved it.
Speaker 2: And in the short he kind of has an existential crisis.
Speaker 3: I'm like, you know, some designer, if you can even
Speaker 3: call them that, just highlighted the text and scrolled down
Speaker 3: and like a child pulling flowers.
Speaker 2: Off of trees as he passes.
Speaker 3: Willy Nilly just selected papyrus and hit you know, print.
Speaker 1: And I want to give it a shout out to
Speaker 1: my second favorite discourse about fonts, ever, which is from McSweeney's.
Speaker 1: All you have to do is, uh, since we're beeping
Speaker 1: already in this episode, all you have to do is
Speaker 1: type in the phrase I'm comic sands ask yeah, and
Speaker 1: you'll be in for a ride. So okay, I said typeface,
Speaker 1: I said font. They're a little bit different. Let's clarify
Speaker 1: the terminology here with some help from Ashworth. Creative typography
Speaker 1: is the art of creating letters that we use every
Speaker 1: day in any language. You design them. You decide what
Speaker 1: the A or the Z always looks like. And a
Speaker 1: font is a collection or set of those things. So
Speaker 1: they include the all the little garnishes of this weird
Speaker 1: English language, the semi colons, the dashes, the interrogatives and exclamations.
Speaker 1: So the typeface is the design you see, it's the
Speaker 1: style and look of a specific font. And you know,
Speaker 1: you raise a great point there, and Noel, the way
Speaker 1: the letters look play such a mission critical role in
Speaker 1: how people encounter the thing. Like imagine, okay, I was
Speaker 1: thinking about this. Imagine if you woke up one day,
Speaker 1: you're driving in traffic and all the road signs are
Speaker 1: in papyrus font.
Speaker 2: I would think I was having a stroke and entering
Speaker 2: some sort of fugue state.
Speaker 1: Most pretentious stop sign ever, it would be disgusted.
Speaker 3: Or even even worse or more chaotic would be you know,
Speaker 3: comic sands like as the whole world just gone stupid,
Speaker 3: you know, like that would be the implication there. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's very interesting, Like the idea of the medium being
Speaker 3: the message right one hundred percent contained within the design
Speaker 3: aesthetic right of these fonts. There's a certain amount of
Speaker 3: intent communicated to the to the consumer, to the to
Speaker 3: the viewer, the reader or whatever, you know, whether they're
Speaker 3: wanting to an ad campaign or whatever, a sign, let's say,
Speaker 3: or a document, you know, like a legal document. They're
Speaker 3: going to have style guides, you know, for various law firms,
Speaker 3: like in terms of how they space things. You know
Speaker 3: that the font they use, you know, what words or
Speaker 3: headings are highlighted, you know how, because it's all meant
Speaker 3: to convey a sense of professionalism, but also a little
Speaker 3: bit of like this is our style. But when you're
Speaker 3: doing like let's say, a poster for a movie or
Speaker 3: you know, advertisement for a product, are you trying to
Speaker 3: convey a sense of fun, excitement, danger perhaps.
Speaker 1: Or normality exactly or consequence. So this week we wanted
Speaker 1: to hang out and talk about not all fonts, not
Speaker 1: the necessarily the history of all fonts hashtag not all fons,
Speaker 1: hashtag not all fonts, or hashtag no tall fonts. English
Speaker 1: is so weird, it's We wanted to talk about the
Speaker 1: fonts that get hated on. We named some of them.
Speaker 1: You know, there's this sort of feedback loop in this
Speaker 1: the age of ubiquitous communication. Anything that becomes too popular
Speaker 1: too quickly inevitably gets haters. So on behalf of these
Speaker 1: very hated fonts, We're gonna say condolences to haters. Let's
Speaker 1: learn more about their history. Nola, you set up comic
Speaker 1: Sands beautifully. Let's talk about comic sands. I can't believe
Speaker 1: I'm saying this. I thought originally we're digging in on this.
Speaker 1: I thought comic Sans made in nineteen ninety four. That's
Speaker 1: pretty recent. And I was politely diplomatically reminded that nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety four was a long long time ago.
Speaker 2: It is. Yeah, it's weird to think, right the nineties.
Speaker 3: You know, they're like children now again, say children who
Speaker 3: are able to vote and.
Speaker 2: Like buy alcohol who were born in the nineties. It's weird, man.
Speaker 3: They just keep you know, we just keep getting older
Speaker 3: and they stay the same age. No, they get older too.
Speaker 3: Max is well one hundred percent, and there's nothing wrong
Speaker 3: with that. Max, go with God.
Speaker 2: We wish you the very best, at least in the
Speaker 2: early nineties ninety one. So I'm like, you know, I
Speaker 2: had a tape a set player in my car.
Speaker 3: Oh, okay, bully for you, young Max, Bully for you.
Speaker 2: You know, why is that? Why is that the street cred?
Speaker 1: You'd have a phonograph in your car?
Speaker 2: Get it? You have an eight track? Come on. But no,
Speaker 2: But here's the thing. I mean the nineties.
Speaker 3: Of course, you know, as you can see with pop
Speaker 3: culture and stuff, anytime a new decade begins, it's basically
Speaker 3: kind of a trickle down remnants of the previous decade. So, honestly, Max,
Speaker 3: the early nineties still very much felt like the eighties. So, uh,
Speaker 3: you're good in my book, buddy, you're good in my book.
Speaker 1: So Comic Sands, there's this guy, his name's Vincent Knarre
Speaker 1: con n ar E. He designs Comic Sands, which is
Speaker 1: a sort of thicker line for the letters, and it
Speaker 1: doesn't have seraphs. You've heard us use the phrase seraph.
Speaker 1: A seraf is the little deally bopped yeah, that goes
Speaker 1: on the edges of letters in other fonts. Times New
Speaker 1: Roman loves a seraph.
Speaker 3: It can kind of make things feel a little more adorned.
Speaker 3: Perhaps they're a little more ornamental, or in the case
Speaker 3: of Times New Roman, almost give the sense of that
Speaker 3: you might have gotten from like a stone cut type
Speaker 3: type faces carved.
Speaker 1: That's the idea. Yeah, that's great, that's a good way
Speaker 1: to put it. It's just that slight projection, that slight
Speaker 1: protuberance off the stroke of a letter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so it makes me think of something naughty,
Speaker 3: I don't know what.
Speaker 1: So so apparently our pal Vinson said, no naughty protuberances
Speaker 1: in my thoughts, and this was he designed it based
Speaker 1: off the fantastic craft of letterers a hand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, comic books in the world, comic comscripts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, if anyone out there's a fanographic novels,
Speaker 3: comic books, whatever, you'll know that there is a credited letterer.
Speaker 3: And that in comics like for example, in The Sandman,
Speaker 3: which I think we all love, the text in the
Speaker 3: speech bubbles for Morpheus look a certain way that like
Speaker 3: have this kind of dreamy quality like everything he's saying,
Speaker 3: Even the bubbles themselves are a little jagged on the edges,
Speaker 3: and the text looks like ancient. And then you know,
Speaker 3: texts from other speakers might just be more of that
Speaker 3: normal kind of that traditional comic lettering, which, like you said,
Speaker 3: is very sans Saraphi. But what if we took that
Speaker 3: that craft of hand lettering and just kind of slapped
Speaker 3: it into a font set and called it a day.
Speaker 2: Who's gonna stop us?
Speaker 3: God? Anyway, So some people just want to watch the
Speaker 3: world burn, then, right, right agents to chaos.
Speaker 1: So there's an excellent article in the Guardian how we
Speaker 1: made the typeface comic Sands, and it has an interview
Speaker 1: with our pal Vincent, and Vincent gives first hand reporting
Speaker 1: of how he figured this out. He says, I was
Speaker 1: working for Microsoft's typography team and they had a lot
Speaker 1: of dealings with people from other applications in Karta, which
Speaker 1: was a thing, creative writer, which was a thing.
Speaker 2: Cardo was Maps, right, I.
Speaker 1: Believe, so yeah, Maps Learning, Encyclopedia publisher. And so Vincent's
Speaker 1: in this weird situation because all these different stakeholders went
Speaker 1: all kinds of different fonts, and he says a lot
Speaker 1: of these fonts felt strange and childlike to him. One
Speaker 1: program was called Microsoft Bob Bob and here's why.
Speaker 2: Here's why.
Speaker 1: Apparently Microsoft Bob was a program designed to make computers
Speaker 1: more accessible, less intimidating to children. And he he said,
Speaker 1: let's give you the quote. He says, I booted it
Speaker 1: up and outwalked this cartoon dog talking with a speech
Speaker 1: bubble in Times New Roman and then Vincent says, dogs
Speaker 1: don't talk in Times New Roman. Conceptually, it made no sense,
Speaker 1: which I don't know how to explain it, but I
Speaker 1: get it. I don't feel like dogs speak in Times
Speaker 1: New Roman.
Speaker 3: No, you're right, absolutely, especially what I guess would be
Speaker 3: considered a cartoon dog. Right, a cartoon dog was speaking
Speaker 3: the language of cartoons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we said, yeah, maybe my Senta Stasia is
Speaker 1: coming out here, but maybe Vincent has Sena Stasia. But
Speaker 1: I totally get it, and I think we all do.
Speaker 1: So he says he had this idea to make a
Speaker 1: comic style text and he started looking at Dark Knight Returns,
Speaker 1: Awesome Watchmen, the graphic novels of the class stations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Dark Knight Returns is I believe Frank Miller, very cool,
Speaker 3: stylized noir, gritty Batman story and obviously Watchman, hugely important
Speaker 3: graphic novel series by Alan Moore, The Notorious League, Cranky
Speaker 3: and witchy Alan Moore. But again, excellent examples of exactly
Speaker 3: what we're talking about in those like using the fonts
Speaker 3: and using the hand lettering style in ways to kind
Speaker 3: of speak to the characters and their motivations. So, you know,
Speaker 3: to our typographer his point, Vincent Kunnair's no, a cartoon
Speaker 3: dog wouldn't speak in Times New Romans He's right. Conceptually,
Speaker 3: it needed to be something that felt like congruous.
Speaker 1: Right mm hmmm, yeah, yeah, and points for congruis though.
Speaker 3: We're having a wordy day, we're having word we're talking
Speaker 3: about letters. We're going to drop some words because you know.
Speaker 3: It's also remember too that in these these days, these
Speaker 3: fonts all had to be installed on your computer, and
Speaker 3: they still do to a degree if you're doing design stuff. Now,
Speaker 3: you know a lot of things are just rendered graphics
Speaker 3: that are like vector based, and you don't necessarily always
Speaker 3: have to have the fonts installed to see, you know,
Speaker 3: stuff on the internet. You know it might, yeah, but
Speaker 3: in these days you absolutely did. And so they had
Speaker 3: to create it couldn't just be a design element that
Speaker 3: was hard baked into the you know, the actual design.
Speaker 3: They had to make something that would be installed on
Speaker 3: every system.
Speaker 1: And Vincent says, he's looking at these graphic novels. He
Speaker 1: loves the hand lettering, he loves the consistency of it,
Speaker 1: and I suspect the disfluency to a larger He says,
Speaker 1: I could have just scanned it in and I could
Speaker 1: have copied what they were doing, but it felt unethical.
Speaker 1: So he looked at specific letters over and over again,
Speaker 1: different instances of them, and he mimicked them on his computer.
Speaker 1: He didn't sketch it, he said, it was just me
Speaker 1: drawing with a mouse, deleting whatever was wrong. And while
Speaker 1: he was doing that, he was breaking all the rules
Speaker 1: of orthodox typography. So like one of the one of
Speaker 1: the old school rules for creating a font or a
Speaker 1: typeface is the idea that there should be a certain symmetry.
Speaker 1: Your ps are gonna your lower case ps are going
Speaker 1: to look like your lowercase cues with just turned in
Speaker 1: different directions. And Max, thank you for the hand signals there.
Speaker 1: It's sad that we're just an audio show for now.
Speaker 1: But Max is doing a great, a great gesture interpretation
Speaker 1: of this, and so our buddy Vincent. He says, no,
Speaker 1: I like this disfluency. I want I want the P
Speaker 1: and the queue to look different. And he doesn't get
Speaker 1: there in time for Microsoft Bob, but he says, this
Speaker 1: is what's nuts. A lot of people don't know this
Speaker 1: about comic Sands. When it first came out, a lot
Speaker 1: of people in Microsoft loved it. It felt fun, you know, zippy.
Speaker 1: It was bang pal kaboom kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 3: It kind of made you feel like you were able
Speaker 3: to communicate the same sort of excitement and whimsy as
Speaker 3: you know comic.
Speaker 1: Strips, and and Vincent says, this is not us, This
Speaker 1: is coming straight from Vincent. He says, our office administrators
Speaker 1: started using the font. Even though it didn't make it
Speaker 1: into Microsoft Bob. They started using it in internal email
Speaker 1: for birthday parties, for a little get togethers, and comic
Speaker 1: Sands was just fun if it, you know, you get
Speaker 1: an email, it's in a different font, and it's it's
Speaker 1: not asking you to turn in some work. It's not
Speaker 1: reminding you about a deadline. It's saying, hey, we're getting
Speaker 1: we're getting together. You know, we're gonna have some like
Speaker 1: casadillas or something, because that defines a party.
Speaker 3: To me, And uh, ain't no party like a Casadia party,
Speaker 3: because the Casadia party goes hot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it goes around like a clock. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: they're so great. They're so great anyway, So eventually this
Speaker 1: becomes so internally popular that they include comic Sands in
Speaker 1: Windows ninety five, and Vincent says he begins to see
Speaker 1: it everywhere, and then the backlash began.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like it's because, like you said, Ben, anything
Speaker 3: that has a sense of over adoption, let's just call it.
Speaker 3: You know, it's going to start having some backlash. But
Speaker 3: a lot of the backlash also just had to do
Speaker 3: with people kind of misusing the font right in ways
Speaker 3: that wasn't appropriate. Because remember, like we said, you know,
Speaker 3: sometimes that font set is used to communicate like a
Speaker 3: certain emotion or idea. So what if, like you said earlier, too, Ben,
Speaker 3: all the traffic signs were in comic sands, it would
Speaker 3: impart a certain lack of authority to those those things,
Speaker 3: you know that you were supposed to fear or at
Speaker 3: the very least pay attention to, not a birthday party invitation.
Speaker 2: Right right?
Speaker 1: I like that because now we're picturing, I know, all
Speaker 1: of us listening today, we're picturing different fonts on traffic signs,
Speaker 1: and that is such a trip right now, a Pyrus
Speaker 1: comic sands.
Speaker 2: Dare I say wing ding?
Speaker 1: People would die?
Speaker 3: I want to know more about the history of wing dings,
Speaker 3: who came up with those and who has ever used
Speaker 3: them success? I guess they're kind of just early clip
Speaker 3: art if you think about it. You know, use the
Speaker 3: little pointing hands as borders in your newsletter, whoever it
Speaker 3: might be.
Speaker 1: Oh, we'll get the wing ding. That might be part two,
Speaker 1: but we'll get the wing ding. We want to sew
Speaker 1: up comic Sands here real quick. Vincent's a good guy,
Speaker 1: smart dude. He made a cool thought. He's proud of it,
Speaker 1: but he I don't know. It just stinks to make
Speaker 1: something on a lark, something fun, something communicative, and then
Speaker 1: have people band together and bond not because they like
Speaker 1: what you made, but because they hate it. It didn't
Speaker 1: take long for a group called ban Comic Sands to form,
Speaker 1: and their whole thing was that they wanted to educate
Speaker 1: people about the uses of typeface. Though in their defense
Speaker 1: they did They did email Vince earlier and ask him
Speaker 1: if it was okay for them to start the group,
Speaker 1: and he's so interesting. Yeah, he said it seems silly,
Speaker 1: but you know, go nuts with it.
Speaker 3: Well, because he cared about the use as well, like
Speaker 3: he was very key to There's a really great quote from
Speaker 3: him saying, you know, when people use it inappropriately, if
Speaker 3: they don't understand how type works, it won't have any
Speaker 3: power or meaning to them. He describes a guy at
Speaker 3: a roth Coo art show. Rothko, you know who does
Speaker 3: a lot of like assembly kind of you know, collage pieces.
Speaker 3: And you know, we've always heard, we've heard of this
Speaker 3: about this guy. Say I could have done that, you know, yeah,
Speaker 3: but you didn't do that. And just because something maybe
Speaker 3: seems rough hewn like. For example, Van Go's art style
Speaker 3: is very you know, childlike in many ways. But that's
Speaker 3: a man who who comes from a background of classical
Speaker 3: style painting. He chose stylistically to present the work that
Speaker 3: he presented. And the same with Rothko. And that's because
Speaker 3: style matters. Style is a communication tool onto itself, beyond
Speaker 3: the words that are actually being typed.
Speaker 1: And let's make space for an anecdote that Vincing gives us.
Speaker 1: That's so cool. In his personal life, he used comic
Speaker 1: Sands one time. He said he was having trouble changing
Speaker 1: his broadband provider, so he wrote to them and he
Speaker 1: sent the He sent the letter in comic Sands and
Speaker 1: it said how disappointed he was, and he got he
Speaker 1: got a refund.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: He said, I recommend it for these cases, his basic
Speaker 1: theory being the following. He says, typography should not shout,
Speaker 1: but comic sands shouts.
Speaker 2: I agree with it.
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe like should we start sending important emails.
Speaker 2: Like at our day Jame memos.
Speaker 3: During this recording, we're gonna We're gonna send No one
Speaker 3: is gonna take you seriously.
Speaker 2: Max takes me serious. Now, oh come, now you're very seriously.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you should see that guy at Monster Jam.
Speaker 2: He's in it.
Speaker 1: Uh so, he says that he being Vincent, the creator
Speaker 1: of Comic Sands, says that people did take to it
Speaker 1: on their own. He said it didn't take any marketing
Speaker 1: from Microsoft, and it often gets misused in the creator's opinion,
Speaker 1: because someone just digs it they vibe with it. He says, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, he's very clear that Comic Sands is not,
Speaker 1: in his opinion appropriate for all things. There was a
Speaker 1: slideshow at CERN right like a a deck basically where
Speaker 1: they announced the discovery of the Higgs Boson, huge moment
Speaker 1: in physics, huge moment in human history. The presentation was
Speaker 1: in Comic Sands, and even Vincent, the guy who made
Speaker 1: Comic Sands a thing, saw that and thought, hm, tut.
Speaker 3: And that's the thing that's so interesting about this. I
Speaker 3: mean this, Vincent is a typographer. You know, he is
Speaker 3: someone who is very well read on the rules, you know,
Speaker 3: and like you said, Ben, when he was making the font,
Speaker 3: he actively ignored those rules on purpose to achieve a result.
Speaker 3: And then because it just became so obnoxiously ubiquitous, people
Speaker 3: using this font, you know, not really understanding its power.
Speaker 3: Like we said, it became hated. And I'll tell you
Speaker 3: in particular because of the very reasons that Vincent outlines.
Speaker 3: And he knows this particularly hated by designers because they
Speaker 3: just find it to be just cliche, and not to
Speaker 3: mention that he broke all the rules of the aesthetic
Speaker 3: of it, so they just find it to be kind
Speaker 3: of just gaudy and just you know, he just it
Speaker 3: makes them cringe.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, it's it's very in vogue to dislike that
Speaker 1: font in particular. And we want to give a shout
Speaker 1: out to David cadavi Over on design for hackers dot com.
Speaker 1: He he knows something I thought was pretty insightful. He
Speaker 1: said to he's a Comic Sans hater. Sorry, David, it's fine.
Speaker 1: Your opinions are your own. He says that Comic Sans
Speaker 1: has poor fundamentals, and he compares it to a much
Speaker 1: more beloved font called Helvetica, and Helvetica has like you
Speaker 1: can pull these up if you want to play along home.
Speaker 1: Helvetica feels much more distinguished, you know, much more more uh,
Speaker 1: much more proper. Max obviously hates it. Max is not
Speaker 1: a Helvetica guy, uh and and Noel, maybe you could
Speaker 1: describe just the vibe of Helvetica. I think when we
Speaker 1: talk thoughts, we're talking vibes, right.
Speaker 3: We super are Helvetica is just it's it's very clean, right,
Speaker 3: it's very legible. It is also it's it's both clean
Speaker 3: and bold. Right, it has this imparts authority to it,
Speaker 3: very European. Yeah, he describes it as as such. Though
Speaker 3: the strokes of Helvetica's letter forms are unmodulated, some adjustments
Speaker 3: are made to improve it legibility. For example, notice how
Speaker 3: the stroke on Helvetica gets thinner or the shoulder meets
Speaker 3: the stem on this letter and he's like in lowercase
Speaker 3: R as well, one hundred percent, So this helps to
Speaker 3: give the letter and more even visual weight. Notice how
Speaker 3: Comic Sands is this way. If you squit your eyes, though,
Speaker 3: there is a disproportionately heavy area where these strokes meet
Speaker 3: on Comic Sands. Well, how Vetica's way is more evenly distributed.
Speaker 3: The ironic thing about this destinction is that comic Sands
Speaker 3: is actually influenced from a drawing tool around felt tipped
Speaker 3: pen or marker, but the stroke of the tool is unmodulated. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: the letter forms of Helvetica are rationalized from predecessors without
Speaker 3: apparent influence of a drawing tool.
Speaker 1: Deep water. Yeah we're in deep water. We're under the
Speaker 1: hood on fonts.
Speaker 3: And we're gonna move on to other font surely. But
Speaker 3: I just wanted to end this segment. I thought we
Speaker 3: could read off a couple of things that might be
Speaker 3: on the poster for the Comic Sands Sucks movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, these are coming from pre pressure dot com. How
Speaker 1: about we round robin, you can do it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the AOL of fonts.
Speaker 2: Max.
Speaker 1: I can't wait for the sound user gobbet Zip's is
Speaker 1: the dirt bastard of the same world.
Speaker 3: An email written in this font makes the sender seem
Speaker 3: ridiculous and out of touch.
Speaker 1: I honestly think when I see comics hands that the
Speaker 1: person has a lower than average intelligence level.
Speaker 3: It's not that it's a terrible font, it's rather that
Speaker 3: it suits non designers far better than those of the
Speaker 3: sense of the esthetic with like.
Speaker 2: Gol. That's the snobbiest quote I've ever round.
Speaker 1: I don't want to hang out with that person. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine them talking about beer or coffee?
Speaker 3: And again, I think we're all fans of design here.
Speaker 3: You know, we're all fans of aesthetic, and obviously we
Speaker 3: wouldn't like write our emails and comic sands either. But
Speaker 3: the level of venom attached to it I find kind
Speaker 3: of mind boggling, and I find it performative. It is
Speaker 3: a little bit yeah, I think so too, as are
Speaker 3: a lot of things, because again, you know, fonts are
Speaker 3: designed to do a thing, and I think Jeff did
Speaker 3: a fantastic job in finding us some really cool contexts
Speaker 3: from the creator himself, who is very much a student
Speaker 3: of font of typography, of design, who made this for
Speaker 3: a very specific reason that you could argue he did successfully.
Speaker 3: But then it's like the way it gets misused and
Speaker 3: misappropriated that create the hate.
Speaker 1: And you know what, if anybody listening today, fellow ridiculous historians,
Speaker 1: if you are a letterer, if you are a designer,
Speaker 1: if you are beefed up with comic sands, you know
Speaker 1: all thet to you, We're just giving you the facts.
Speaker 1: We also have to point out, in all fairness, folks,
Speaker 1: you're obsessed with it, You're fascinated by it. We are
Speaker 1: making this a two part episode because we needed to
Speaker 1: spend the first part on comic sands.
Speaker 2: I mean, come on, right, no, back me up here.
Speaker 3: Well, not only on comic Sands, but I think we
Speaker 3: had to set the stage for the whole larger conversation,
Speaker 3: you know, talking a bit about just the history of
Speaker 3: fonts and all of that stuff. And then within the
Speaker 3: conversation of comic Sans, I think we kind of hopefully
Speaker 3: established sort of a bigger framework as to where we're heading.
Speaker 3: So we're gonna make part two a little bit more
Speaker 3: of a grab bag. So maybe part one would be, like,
Speaker 3: you know, fonts we love to hate. Part one the
Speaker 3: comic Sans story.
Speaker 2: There we go.
Speaker 1: I also, I've got to figure out a way to
Speaker 1: publish this and play with thoughts. I don't know if
Speaker 1: we could. I don't know if the technology is there yet,
Speaker 1: but if it is, uh, prepare, prepare to be uh.
Speaker 1: You know, we hope you give you We give you
Speaker 1: a chuckle. We also hope that you tune in for
Speaker 1: our further exploration of fonts. Big big thanks to super
Speaker 1: producer mister Max wing Ding Williams, Big big thanks to
Speaker 1: our research associate Jeff San Sarah Bartlett. I'm just I'm
Speaker 1: passing out font nicknames, NOL, what do you what's a
Speaker 1: good win for Jonathan Strickland got.
Speaker 2: To be Oh, the put me on the spot. I
Speaker 2: don't know enough fought names. I'm not a font nerd.
Speaker 2: I'm excited to to dig into some more though, on
Speaker 2: the next episode. We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 3: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 3: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.