Speaker 1: Ridiculous Histories, the production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the
Speaker 1: show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for
Speaker 1: tuning in. This is part two of a special series
Speaker 1: on fonts that a lot of people hate. Please listen
Speaker 1: to part one where you can hear some vim and vinegar,
Speaker 1: not only from our super producer, mister Max Williams, but
Speaker 1: from mister Noel Brown and from me as well. They
Speaker 1: call me Ben Noel. You remember how in a different
Speaker 1: show we talked a bit about out the frequency illusion,
Speaker 1: which is when you maybe you hear a word and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden you feel like you hear that
Speaker 1: word all the time, or you buy a car you
Speaker 1: feel like you see that car all the time.
Speaker 2: For that phenom it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just so, it's bader Minehoff and sometimes called frequency illusion.
Speaker 1: And that happened to me with papyrus uh after part
Speaker 1: one of our fonts episode, I remember thinking, wow, papyrus
Speaker 1: is everywhere and it really does seem to damage the
Speaker 1: credibility of what's being communicated.
Speaker 3: Were you compelled to go and watch the uh, the
Speaker 3: the avatar films after that? I was not. I was not.
Speaker 2: I I was.
Speaker 1: It's funny because on our On another show we do
Speaker 1: called stuff they Don't Want you to Know. We recently
Speaker 1: recorded an episode about a mysterious bridge in Scotland, uh
Speaker 1: called the Dog Suicide Bridge. And I didn't mention that
Speaker 1: on that show, and I probably won't. But the one
Speaker 1: book that is written about it is leans more into
Speaker 1: supernatural explanations and folks, the the cover font is in papyrus.
Speaker 2: No it's not.
Speaker 1: It is published.
Speaker 2: Does that not just screen side published though?
Speaker 1: But you know, research is important, so I had to
Speaker 1: do the due diligence of read it. But but we
Speaker 1: in the interim, folks, we found so many other strange
Speaker 1: fonts such that we might have to return in another
Speaker 1: installment to talk about controversial fonts in non Western languages.
Speaker 1: But but for now, with some help from our research
Speaker 1: associate Jeff Bartlett, I don't know, man, let's let's dive
Speaker 1: into Times New Roman.
Speaker 2: Why not Times New Roman?
Speaker 3: Indeed, this is a font we kind of talked about
Speaker 3: some of the more let's call them credible fonts. You
Speaker 3: know how Vetica came up as sort of like end
Speaker 3: all be all for designers in terms of just the
Speaker 3: right amount of thinning of the of the joints between
Speaker 3: the letters and all of that stuff, just the right
Speaker 3: amount of Sarah for lack of Sarah and all that,
Speaker 3: and Times New Roman sort of has earned, I guess
Speaker 3: itsself a place in the history of fonts. It's a
Speaker 3: little bit divisive because it's sort of what you would
Speaker 3: consider like a templatized sort of standard font, and for
Speaker 3: that reason alone, I think it may have also earned
Speaker 3: itself a bit of a place on the shit list.
Speaker 2: Let's call it, you know, a fonts Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh, and also we talked about curning in part one,
Speaker 1: but I don't think we defined it. Curning is the
Speaker 1: way spacing between characters works. The Times New Roman dates
Speaker 1: back to the original Roman Type in fourteen seventy. This
Speaker 1: guy named Nicholas Jensen creates Roman Type, and he is
Speaker 1: inspired by the text on ancient Roman buildings, and it
Speaker 1: catches on pretty quickly. Chances are if you pull up
Speaker 1: a word process or whether that's Microsoft Word or what
Speaker 1: have you, you're probably going to look at Times New
Speaker 1: Roman rather than Roman Type, which you don't see so
Speaker 1: much today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's you know, it's a font that does
Speaker 3: a really good job of displaying Roman numerals for good reason,
Speaker 3: you know, I mean, it really is that kind of traditional,
Speaker 3: the kind of font that you might think of as
Speaker 3: being etched, you know, the product of some sort of
Speaker 3: artisanal stone cutting. And as we said, this font has
Speaker 3: historically been kind of the standard, you know, set font
Speaker 3: for word processors, you know, like Microsoft Word or note
Speaker 3: Pad or whatever. It's the kind of the one that
Speaker 3: comes up by default. But it actually started with a
Speaker 3: bit of a spirit of competition, sort of similar to similar,
Speaker 3: but very different to the story behind comic sans Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a real hold my beer moment in the
Speaker 1: history of typeface. There's this guy, Stanley Morrison. He's already
Speaker 1: got his bona fides. He is an esteemed type designer,
Speaker 1: and he starts a beef with the famous London newspaper,
Speaker 1: The Times, and he says, look, you all are a
Speaker 1: bunch of stuffed shirts. You're elitist. You're out of touch
Speaker 1: with the modern typographical trends, which you know, to be fair,
Speaker 1: most of the public probably didn't care about. So the
Speaker 1: Time says, okay, stan you talk so big, why don't
Speaker 1: you make something better? And he says, well I will.
Speaker 1: He gets a draft named Victor Lardent to start brainstorming
Speaker 1: with him, and they land on two goals. We're going
Speaker 1: to be efficient and we're going to be easy on
Speaker 1: the eyes. Efficient meaning we're going to maximize the amount
Speaker 1: of type, the number of characters you can fit on
Speaker 1: a line, and we're also going to make it easier
Speaker 1: to read. We're getting a lot of this from a
Speaker 1: great article on nypl dot org by Meredith Mann called
Speaker 1: where did Times New Roman come from? And it's you know,
Speaker 1: London Times New Roman. He was petty enough that he
Speaker 1: put the name of the paper in the name of
Speaker 1: the font.
Speaker 3: So in nineteen twenty six the British Medical Research Council
Speaker 3: published a report diving into the legibility of print and
Speaker 3: you know how this affects readers, and they issued some
Speaker 3: guidelines or some recommendations right for what would achieve maximum legibility,
Speaker 3: and Times New Roman attempted to really, you know, adhere
Speaker 3: to these guidelines. There were some test pages that were
Speaker 3: submitted to what is referred to in the article that
Speaker 3: you cite had been as a distinguished ophthalmolic authority, right,
Speaker 3: And so then it became, you know, once they kind
Speaker 3: of got the thumbs up from said distinguished ophthalmolic authority.
Speaker 3: They were able to kind of issue almost like a
Speaker 3: three out of four doctors agree. You know, Times New
Speaker 3: Roman is easy on the eyes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's for your health. And they said, okay, we've
Speaker 1: got some credibility, we've got scientific analysis that's pretty good,
Speaker 1: but we need to see we need to drive this
Speaker 1: around the block. Essentially, we need to see how it
Speaker 1: works when you actually read it. So members for this team,
Speaker 1: the Report on the Legibility of Print team spent a
Speaker 1: long time reading this and they case tested it. They
Speaker 1: read it out during nice afternoons in the sunlight, they
Speaker 1: read it under artificial light. They tested and tested and
Speaker 1: tested again, and they finally approved it. They called it
Speaker 1: The Times New Broman, and on October third, nineteen thirty two,
Speaker 1: The Times had their big reveal. They debuted it, and
Speaker 1: all of the readers of the paper, The Times were
Speaker 1: reminded daily of the importance of type and printing, at
Speaker 1: least that's according to the monotype Recorder, which, as you
Speaker 1: can tell, might be a bit of a bias source.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 1: This was also the first time ever that a newspaper
Speaker 1: designed its own typeface.
Speaker 3: Rightan, and that's a big deal, because as we know,
Speaker 3: you know, the history of typography is one that kind
Speaker 3: of begins with actual type setting and you know, creating
Speaker 3: these sets of letters and characters that were designed by
Speaker 3: you know, specific individuals that worked at printing presses. So
Speaker 3: typically the printing press was sort of separate from the
Speaker 3: publishing or the content creation right of the news. So
Speaker 3: this really was kind of a big deal. This means though,
Speaker 3: that the Times actually owned this font and they had
Speaker 3: exclusive rights to it, but only for a year, which
Speaker 3: is interesting. How does that work?
Speaker 2: Ben?
Speaker 3: Is this like why was there such a clock put
Speaker 3: on it as opposed to what would normally be a
Speaker 3: longer period for copywriting or a trademarking of something.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I'm guessing it's someone with pen laws.
Speaker 4: But it's like, you know, how quickly does it becomes
Speaker 4: kind of universal like thing? That's kind of a lot
Speaker 4: of times how that stuff goes, like i know, with
Speaker 4: trademarks or stuff like that, especially like brand names. Once
Speaker 4: it becomes universal, like calling something a search engine googling
Speaker 4: it is like an example of.
Speaker 1: Sure proprietary, right, Yeah, Yeah, It's it's tough to know
Speaker 1: for sure. We we can speculate on a couple of things. One,
Speaker 1: it may have been part of the agreement the Times pitched.
Speaker 1: Two it may have been part of the negotiations between
Speaker 1: Stanley and the Times because he might have known he
Speaker 1: had lightning in a bottle, and the price that they
Speaker 1: would have to pay for exclusivity may have been pretty prohibitive.
Speaker 1: But also to your point, Max, it would be difficult
Speaker 1: to enforce rights after a certain amount of time. But
Speaker 1: they it turned out they didn't really have a lot
Speaker 1: to worry about in terms of exclusivity for the immediate
Speaker 1: future because after those rights laps, publishers over in the
Speaker 1: United States, especially newspaper publishers, aren't champion at the bit,
Speaker 1: and it is champion at the bit, not chomping. They're
Speaker 1: not champing at the bit to a adopt this new
Speaker 1: font because they're being cheapskates. It needs more ink and
Speaker 1: it needs a better quality of paper. And so essentially
Speaker 1: the William Randolph Hearsts of the world across the pond
Speaker 1: are saying no, we're not nah pass. So we see
Speaker 1: Times New Roaming come out, not first in newspapers in
Speaker 1: the US, but in books and magazines, notably Woman's Home
Speaker 1: Companion in December nineteen forty one precisely.
Speaker 3: So you're starting to see this wide adoption of this font,
Speaker 3: which is a big deal, and a lot of the
Speaker 3: stems from the fact that it really was incredibly legible,
Speaker 3: you know, and in small print. As we know, newspapers
Speaker 3: and magazines are trying their best to shove as much
Speaker 3: content into as small a space as possible to maximize
Speaker 3: what they can put in their publications, the amount of
Speaker 3: stuff that they can cover.
Speaker 2: So this was a big deal.
Speaker 3: This is still a time where this is not a
Speaker 3: computerized process at all. You know, this is in the
Speaker 3: nineteen forties and fifties where these you know, type sets
Speaker 3: were still part of the process of printing, you know,
Speaker 3: physical metal letters and characters, and these were There was
Speaker 3: something called punches that actually helped create the molds for
Speaker 3: casting these types. And they were created by a company
Speaker 3: called the Monotype Corporation, and they collaborated with the Linotype Company,
Speaker 3: and I believe Monotype and Linotype are still you know,
Speaker 3: names that resonate within the typography community to this day.
Speaker 3: These were manufacturers of machines that would do type setting,
Speaker 3: so they really were very very important organizations, you know,
Speaker 3: for creating mass produced media. Both companies made sets of
Speaker 3: these letters that were available for purchase. The monotype version
Speaker 3: was known as Times New Roman. The linotype version was
Speaker 3: just Times Roman. So if we move forward a little bit,
Speaker 3: quite a bit actually into the I guess more like
Speaker 3: the eighties, into the computer era, where we start to
Speaker 3: see selectable fonts being used in word processing programs, like
Speaker 3: you know, those created by Apple computers. Because remember, early on,
Speaker 3: before computers could do all of the crazy things that
Speaker 3: we know and love today, they were essentially bespoke typewriters,
Speaker 3: you know. So Apple licensed the linotype version and Microsoft
Speaker 3: licensed the monotype version. That is why the way the
Speaker 3: appearance of these fonts to this day between Apple and
Speaker 3: Windows machines look a little bit different.
Speaker 1: Thanks, Can I get the more? You know, close enough
Speaker 1: to not get a suit? That's a true story. It's
Speaker 1: a weird historical footnote. We should also footnote that the
Speaker 1: Times was not was not super on board with people
Speaker 1: using their font in books in any long form writing.
Speaker 1: They said, quote, it is a newspaper type and hardly
Speaker 1: a book type, for it is strictly appointed for use
Speaker 1: in short lines, i e. In columns. And they went
Speaker 1: back and later developed a wider version of times New
Speaker 1: Roman to fit the longer lines of text in a book,
Speaker 1: and the idea that the use of a typeface affects
Speaker 1: its form struck our writer man that we mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: as incredibly relevant still in the modern day. You know,
Speaker 1: a lot of books are entirely published electronically. A lot
Speaker 1: of the stuff that the average person reads is not
Speaker 1: a book. It's an article on the on the phone,
Speaker 1: it's an article on a web page somewhere. And that's
Speaker 1: why the ideas that Stanley had originally efficiency and ease
Speaker 1: of reading, right, these are still incredibly crucial today. That's
Speaker 1: why you see the newer kids on the printing block. No,
Speaker 1: keep it up. It's folks like folks like Ariel and Calibri.
Speaker 1: How do you guys pronounce it?
Speaker 3: I guess maybe Calibri. Calibri sounds good. I think it's
Speaker 3: potato potato.
Speaker 4: Your pronunciation sounded better than how I've ever said it.
Speaker 2: How do you say it? I don't know. Calibri.
Speaker 1: You say Calibri with like four eyes at the end.
Speaker 4: I see it selected and immediately change it.
Speaker 2: There you go, okay, all right?
Speaker 1: So, uh, the these typefaces are quite competitive nowadays because
Speaker 1: if you're reading on a screen, the lack of seahs.
Speaker 1: Remember our technical definition from part one. Seraffs are those
Speaker 1: little dally bops at the end at the industry, the
Speaker 1: little dongles, you know, the little hangars. Yeah, the little
Speaker 1: weness bumps there. If you don't have seraphs, then for
Speaker 1: most people it's easier to read a word on a screen.
Speaker 1: But Times New Roman is almost a century old, and
Speaker 1: it made the jump from print to digital. I think
Speaker 1: maybe maybe nol we talk about the idea that fonts
Speaker 1: without seraphs are easier to read. Why is that or
Speaker 1: do we have any specifics on that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure, I mean the idea being that, I
Speaker 3: think it's just a little bit less distracting. It is
Speaker 3: a little faster to process. Sands Sarah of fonts, you know,
Speaker 3: like you mentioned stuff like Tahoma ver Donna Ariel and
Speaker 3: Paula Peters on Medium points out that, you know, these
Speaker 3: days we're kind of blasting through text. You know, the
Speaker 3: average viewer or the average reader only spends about eleven
Speaker 3: seconds reading an email and around sixty seconds reading a
Speaker 3: twenty page proposal of some sort. She cites sales proposals
Speaker 3: so you know, since we're kind of living in a
Speaker 3: culture of scanning, the more legible the better. But as
Speaker 3: we mentioned at the top of the show, I think
Speaker 3: Times New Roman, while very effective at communicating because of
Speaker 3: its wide adoption in books, you know, magazines, newspapers, publications
Speaker 3: of all kinds, because of this study that we talked
Speaker 3: about that cited its incredible legibility, I think people just
Speaker 3: got bored with it, you know, like like anything that
Speaker 3: you kind of get inundated with. So while it was
Speaker 3: an effective tool, you know, and accomplished exactly what it
Speaker 3: was set out to do, when you start getting into
Speaker 3: like design communities and folks that are maybe looking to
Speaker 3: have things, you know, have a little bit more of
Speaker 3: an aesthetic flare, it starts to become so overly recognizable
Speaker 3: to the point of being cliche.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: Another comparison would be the fashion of business suits, right,
Speaker 1: like double breasted suits. When you see them, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about, they scream seventies, eighties. There's still
Speaker 1: a suit, there's still the reason that person is not
Speaker 1: naked in front of you. They get the job done,
Speaker 1: but you know, there's something aesthetic about it, and this
Speaker 1: leads Paula Peters to say that modern audiences love a
Speaker 1: font without a seraph. If you pay attention, you'll start
Speaker 1: seeing this everywhere. We don't want to get in your
Speaker 1: head too far, folks, but look around. Odds are you
Speaker 1: will I'll not be far away from something written right.
Speaker 1: And if you are reading Latin based language, then you
Speaker 1: are probably going to notice there's a lack of saraph
Speaker 1: in most of the things you're seeing now, Sarah. Fonts
Speaker 1: are easy to read if you have a really big monitor,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like if you play World
Speaker 1: of Warcraft and you're reading something on that same monitor,
Speaker 1: times New Roman Chef Kiss beautiful. But if you're reading
Speaker 1: on a mobile phone, like so many people these days,
Speaker 1: then you're gonna see that it's a little bit more difficult.
Speaker 1: And as Peters points out, nowadays, almost sixty two percent
Speaker 1: of all emails are opened on a smartphone. And if
Speaker 1: you look at the millennial generation in particular, which we
Speaker 1: are apart, then you'll see that number goes up to
Speaker 1: eighty eight percent. No one tell our bosses, but a
Speaker 1: lot of times, a lot of times we're like in
Speaker 1: bed or we're walking somewhere.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, multitasking, yeah, listening to other stuff, perhaps watch
Speaker 3: researching on a computer, while looking at emails on the phone,
Speaker 3: you know, all of that stuff. It's definitely part of
Speaker 3: the equation for sure. I think one of the biggest
Speaker 3: issues though, is just the kind of dated vibe of
Speaker 3: Times New Roman and what it communicates about your brand
Speaker 3: or your company, you know, as like philosophically speaking, you know,
Speaker 3: everyone kind of does.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 3: One wants to be considered old fashion nowadays, like everyone
Speaker 3: wants to feel like they're in some way on the
Speaker 3: cutting edge, and design is a big part of that,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: Like you said, the medium is the message.
Speaker 3: So what you put out there, whether it be your
Speaker 3: style guide for communications within a company, you know, your
Speaker 3: signature file, for example, companies even like ours, have a
Speaker 3: very lized and uniform way of formatting those signature files,
Speaker 3: including the fought choice mm hmmm.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: If you, for instance, think about it this way. If
Speaker 1: you are considering putting money into a new or bleeding
Speaker 1: edge industry and you go to their website and it's
Speaker 1: in Times New Roman, then you're going to think they
Speaker 1: don't get it. I don't know if these are the
Speaker 1: people I trust for this investment, So we have to
Speaker 1: be conscious of this. You know, it's often said by
Speaker 1: great communicators that how you say something matters as much
Speaker 1: as what you are saying.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: A great deal of information in in person conversations is
Speaker 1: conveyed via intonation and body language, which is why it's
Speaker 1: easy to misread a text.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The same holds true with fonts. To some degree. The
Speaker 1: thought you choose will influence the way your message is
Speaker 1: interpreted by the readers, and that's why you see things
Speaker 1: like multiple graphic designers have written their own diatribes. Dare
Speaker 1: I say manifestos about Times New Roman. They say things
Speaker 1: like it's corny and boring. Avoid it when you can.
Speaker 1: It's bad, it's ugly. One person said. It makes me
Speaker 1: nervous when I see it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we are here, we are with the poster out,
Speaker 3: you know, the the reviews are in for Times New Romans,
Speaker 3: like we did with with Comic Sands. Again, Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 3: especially when you're looking at things through the lens of
Speaker 3: a designer, this is something that's absolutely going to make
Speaker 3: them cringe for all the reasons. The outline, it's dated,
Speaker 3: it's not maybe as easy to read as some kind
Speaker 3: of updated versions of the quote unquote more legible fonts,
Speaker 3: and it really does say a lot about kind of
Speaker 3: your attitude towards aesthetics and towards kind of being seen
Speaker 3: as a little bit more on the cutting edge.
Speaker 1: Which led some people to say, I want a font
Speaker 1: that makes an impact. Hey, Impact, Impact, Impact Sunday, Sunday Sunday.
Speaker 3: Exactly, Impact being like one of the more aggressive thoughts.
Speaker 3: It's a fund that you want a font that smacks
Speaker 3: you in the head like a stack of bricks.
Speaker 2: Impact is for you.
Speaker 1: Impact invented in nineteen sixty five by Jeffrey Lee. It
Speaker 1: is easy to read. It is sansera. It does grab
Speaker 1: your attention, but it is in the world of zime
Speaker 1: people think it's often a little too thin in the strokes.
Speaker 1: It's amateurish. It's most commonly used on documents that have
Speaker 1: been quote designed by people who don't know what they're
Speaker 1: doing when it comes to typefaces, and as such it
Speaker 1: should be avoided. That is coming to us from vandalaiddesign
Speaker 1: dot com in an article by Steven Snell.
Speaker 3: Exactly, it's the kind of font that you might see
Speaker 3: if you highlight something in a like let's say you're
Speaker 3: using notes like on an iPhone, and then you highlight
Speaker 3: it and just select heading. That's what it's going to
Speaker 3: present you with, something with kind of a large amount
Speaker 3: of space in between the letters, which arguably does make
Speaker 3: it a little easier to read, and a kind of
Speaker 3: inherent boldness to it. But again it's just a little
Speaker 3: bit cliche, you know. It's like sort of almost mimicking
Speaker 3: the headlines of yesteryear, in the same way that comic
Speaker 3: Sands was trying to mimic the way text was designed
Speaker 3: for speech bubbles and cartoons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And imagine reading an official like an official
Speaker 1: government document or a paper of note in impact thought,
Speaker 1: after the headline, you make a great point about the headline.
Speaker 1: After the headline, it would start to feel off somehow.
Speaker 1: Jeffery Lee designed this font because he was in the
Speaker 1: midst of the nineteen sixties, and the mid nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: as we know, experienced a renaissance for bold condensed type
Speaker 1: faces that, according to designers, probably came about through other
Speaker 1: cut up prints and art of the day, specifically something
Speaker 1: called the Schmalfett grotesque font, which had been drawn by
Speaker 1: Volter Hottenschweiler Hottenschweiler, and because Impact was less condensed than
Speaker 1: this other font. To your point about Kerning, designers often
Speaker 1: use these two fonts together, and you could use Impact
Speaker 1: for you know, Impact man maximum.
Speaker 3: I love the idea of a font being grotesque, though
Speaker 3: I think some designers might consider all of these fonts
Speaker 3: that we're talking about, you know, in these episodes, to
Speaker 3: be grotesque.
Speaker 2: Shout out to small fet.
Speaker 1: Yes, shout out this small efet And developers. Oh, here's
Speaker 1: where you see Impact the most nowadays, fellow ridiculous historians.
Speaker 1: You see it in memes. It's the default font for
Speaker 1: things like caption meme. It's the default font for a
Speaker 1: lot of those macros you can make your own. And
Speaker 1: developers use Impact because it's super readable, it's ubiquitous, it's
Speaker 1: available at every computer. You don't have to download a
Speaker 1: new font pack, and you don't have to read a
Speaker 1: lot for a meme usually, right, a meme is hopefully
Speaker 1: I don't want to sound pretentious. You can hate or
Speaker 1: love memes or as they're called sometimes shit posts, but
Speaker 1: you have to admit there's an art and beauty to
Speaker 1: the economy of language, no question.
Speaker 3: And you know, as is the case for a lot
Speaker 3: of Internet culture, you know, and kind of like stuff
Speaker 3: that might have found its origins on forums, you know,
Speaker 3: like something Awful or Penny Arcade or some of these
Speaker 3: you know forums that sort of kind of got condensed
Speaker 3: since now what we know has read it. I guess,
Speaker 3: I mean all these other There are, of course forums
Speaker 3: that still exist that are more under the radar, but
Speaker 3: now Reddit has kind of become the more like mainstream
Speaker 3: version of a lot of this type of Internet communication.
Speaker 3: Dated fonts and kind of you know, Internet relics are
Speaker 3: like a big part of the presentation for these kinds
Speaker 3: of things.
Speaker 1: And our pal, Jeff Bartlett, not Jeffrey Lee, Jeff Bartlett
Speaker 1: research associate, wants everyone to know that he has only
Speaker 1: one tattoo and it is sapere aude Latin for dare
Speaker 1: to know, and an old school like motto of the
Speaker 1: Age of Enlightenment. Says it's on his forearm, it is
Speaker 1: in impact fonts, and he has no regrets.
Speaker 3: All right, you heard it here first. Oh man, I'm
Speaker 3: so excited. I'm so excs for this next one. We've
Speaker 3: been teasing it from the start, good old Papyrus, you know,
Speaker 3: if we're talking about fonts that are trying to invoke
Speaker 3: a certain feeling, you know, a certain like you know,
Speaker 3: we said comic Sands was trying to evoke whimsy or
Speaker 3: sort of creativity or you know, like a lightness to
Speaker 3: their communications. I'm not quite sure what Papyrus is supposed
Speaker 3: to communicate in that respect.
Speaker 2: Is it mysticism? Is it the age, the wisdom of
Speaker 2: the ancient?
Speaker 1: Like you're reading a scroll, you know, Max, give us
Speaker 1: some like D and D Renaissance festival music, you know,
Speaker 1: dungeons and dragons. Sw I mean by D and.
Speaker 2: D not do not disturb.
Speaker 1: So here here's our certa intrue, maybe a fife, the flute,
Speaker 1: a bit of elup. There's an American. His name is
Speaker 1: Chris Costello. He creates Papyrus in nineteen eighty three. This
Speaker 1: is also Yeah, this reminds me. I associate Papyrus with
Speaker 1: the early oh, the early computer games. I used to
Speaker 1: play by Sierra Entertainment. So shout out to anyone who
Speaker 1: remembers King's Quest. But he Chris says, this is one
Speaker 1: of my proudest accomplishments. He's also Chris has his stripes.
Speaker 1: He's a graphic designer, illustrator, web designer, and he says
Speaker 1: similar to the creation of comic sands. He says that
Speaker 1: Papyrus was made with certain intent and it was never
Speaker 1: meant to be used on the logos of big businesses,
Speaker 1: on mortgage companies, construction logos, just like our Times New
Speaker 1: Roman example. You wouldn't trust, say, a cryptocurrency outfit that
Speaker 1: had their website in Times New Roman. You would you
Speaker 1: trust a mortgage company in papyrus like their font ism Papyrus.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't trust a mortgage company general funds, but no,
Speaker 3: definitely not. Or perhaps a realtor you know who's who's
Speaker 3: whose yard signs have their name emblazoned in papyrus. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it has kind of taken on the reputation of being
Speaker 3: the most maligned font on the planet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Pepsi to the Coca Cola of comic sans.
Speaker 1: Papyrus is famous for being misused. You see it in
Speaker 1: business cards, letterheads, signs, et cetera. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of websites that exist just to make fun of Papyrus.
Speaker 1: It gets featured ironically and all kinds of things in
Speaker 1: television shows, in sketch comedy. If you want to sort
Speaker 1: of undercut the character who is being cartoonish in the sketch.
Speaker 1: Then you have them without explanation, use Papyrus and shout
Speaker 1: out to Snell's sketch. We mentioned shout out to the
Speaker 1: McSweeney's article, which I'd love to read in full, the
Speaker 1: Comics's articles just oh, it's so good.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 1: Chris Costello sold the rights to his font, and he
Speaker 1: regrets it a little bit. He says, there have definitely
Speaker 1: been days I wish I'd never sold the rights, and
Speaker 1: I get that there are a lot of critics, but
Speaker 1: hate if you must. Papyrus is on over a billion
Speaker 1: computers around the world. It's a font you can choose
Speaker 1: right now.
Speaker 3: You can definitely choose it, as we saw a designer
Speaker 3: choosing it from the list of drop Town available fonts
Speaker 3: in that amazing SNL short about you know, Papyrus being
Speaker 3: the logo for Avatar, a multi billion dollar grossing you know,
Speaker 3: fantasy science fiction franchise. Watch that if you get a
Speaker 3: chance with Ryan Gosley. It puts a lot of context
Speaker 3: around this, but you know, with you if you look
Speaker 3: at the font though on its own, and you saw
Speaker 3: it like as a singular work, maybe before the ubiquity
Speaker 3: of it, like on the cover of a comic book
Speaker 3: or something. It does evoke kind of like a biblical,
Speaker 3: kind of Middle Eastern mystical kind of vibe, you know,
Speaker 3: And that's exactly what Costello was trying to do when
Speaker 3: he was messing around with a calligraphy pen on a
Speaker 3: literal piece of parchment paper, and he, you know, was
Speaker 3: kind of fooling around and created these sort of ornate
Speaker 3: sort of capital letters that had these brushstrokes or kind
Speaker 3: of pen strokes, you know, on the edges. And he
Speaker 3: also claims that he got to this place because he
Speaker 3: was on a bit of a biblical journey himself.
Speaker 1: Reading a lot of history, spiritual and geographical about the
Speaker 1: Middle East. And then he also said he dove into
Speaker 1: the Biblical times. That's a quote from him, and he
Speaker 1: was drawing a lot of ligatures and letters with these
Speaker 1: hairlined arrangements, and this struck a chord internally for Chris Costello,
Speaker 1: and over the course of just a few days, worked
Speaker 1: on these letters until he had generated an entire Roman
Speaker 1: alphabet in all caps, and he was pretty happy with it.
Speaker 1: He said, you know what, I'm gonna call this papyrus.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna see if I can turn it into a
Speaker 1: font and get this ridiculous historians. This was the very
Speaker 1: first typeface he ever worked on. This is a lot
Speaker 1: like going into a studio and saying, I play a
Speaker 1: little guitar, I've never recorded anything, and then boom, you've
Speaker 1: created you know, what's a what's a hated pop song? Macharena?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely maybe you know, let's say the instrument was
Speaker 3: maybe more of like a cowbell or something. Right, you
Speaker 3: make the most cow the most.
Speaker 2: Noted cow bell song of all time. Right, that then
Speaker 2: becomes something of a trope.
Speaker 1: And the thing is he sent this out. I wanted
Speaker 1: to sell it, and he said, everybody rejected me. The
Speaker 1: big names, the small names and type distribution, which is
Speaker 1: an industry, honestly, folks, I had never thought about until
Speaker 1: he talks to one company, a small outfit called Letra
Speaker 1: Set British company, and he believes they may have been
Speaker 1: the creators of louram ipsum. And you guys know everybody
Speaker 1: knows lauram ipsum, right, it's the famous placeholder text.
Speaker 3: Well that yeah, or like the the whatever what like
Speaker 3: a font is missing?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Or that isn't that what comes up by default the content. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's it's like a mock. Oh no, it's to demonstrates. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's to demonstrate a font because I think it has
Speaker 3: or it's sort of like the quick brown fox jumps over.
Speaker 2: The lazy dog.
Speaker 3: I think it demonstrates a good number of characters in
Speaker 3: a font set. So it's used to kind of showcase,
Speaker 3: like you know, the letters, the style of the letters
Speaker 3: in a particular font.
Speaker 1: The I feel, Yeah, that makes sense, right, How do
Speaker 1: my eyes feel looking at this in this font? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's smart too. So like Comic Sands, if there's a
Speaker 1: villain in the story for people who hate Comic Sands
Speaker 1: and Papyrus, then it's Microsoft, right, because those those fonts
Speaker 1: may not have caught on if they weren't pre installed
Speaker 1: on Microsoft Office starting with Office ninety seven. Actually, behind
Speaker 1: the scenes, I don't know if we want to keep
Speaker 1: this in, but I was looking through the fonts on
Speaker 1: the shared docs we use that I was gonna see
Speaker 1: if I could put it in put virus, but I
Speaker 1: decided not.
Speaker 2: We've got a show to do.
Speaker 3: Well. That's the thing though, right, Like it's no longer
Speaker 3: that you know, ubiquitously pre installed font that it used
Speaker 3: to be. And a lot of the history that we're
Speaker 3: talking about has exactly to do with what you're saying.
Speaker 3: You know, you have like a sort of taste maker
Speaker 3: or like a company like Microsoft that determines what goes
Speaker 3: on these machines that are widely adopted, and then it's
Speaker 3: ultimately up to creators to kind of proliferate which fonts
Speaker 3: become the thing, you know, but then they sort of
Speaker 3: create the palletts at the tones that were available to
Speaker 3: designers and obviously non designers alike. Not to mention, you
Speaker 3: remember back in the day when like web pages would
Speaker 3: be in weird fonts, you know, but you were limited
Speaker 3: to what fonts were installed, whether you were a Mac
Speaker 3: user or a PC user. And now web pages and
Speaker 3: various designs don't necessarily depend on you having that font
Speaker 3: installed unless you want to actually create something. You know,
Speaker 3: things are generated into like vector images or whatever, you know,
Speaker 3: like high quality JPEGs. You don't have to have that
Speaker 3: thuon installed, so you can get all kinds of design
Speaker 3: elements that don't rely on the user having that. But
Speaker 3: back in the day, it was literally sourcing what fonts
Speaker 3: you had on your computer. And then recreating that with
Speaker 3: those characters that were actually installed on your physical machines.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I mean Microsoft Office starting in ninety seven,
Speaker 3: like you said, is really to blame for, at the
Speaker 3: very least, giving folks the options that, some of which
Speaker 3: became these hated fonts.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he nailed it, man. And it's strange because none
Speaker 1: of these font creators, these designers, they're not bad guys.
Speaker 1: They're not Bond level villains. They made something really cool
Speaker 1: and it's just in the way people used it.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Of course, when you're learning about the creator of Papyrus,
Speaker 1: if you hate Papyrus, you may be tempted to think
Speaker 1: of this guy as some kind of Bond level graphic
Speaker 1: design supervillain. But believe it or not, folks, he only
Speaker 1: got the equivalent of about two five hundred dollars for
Speaker 1: selling the rights, so he probably lost out on millions
Speaker 1: of dollars, given that one in seven people on the
Speaker 1: planet has access to Papyrus on their computer.
Speaker 3: But that's the thing too, You know, a font that
Speaker 3: comes pre installed like that is sort of like having
Speaker 3: back to our discussion on sampling, you know, not the
Speaker 3: cheese cubes, but like sampling of music. You know, if
Speaker 3: you buy a keyboard like a synthesizer or a you know,
Speaker 3: a sampler or whatever, and it has presets on it,
Speaker 3: those are available to be used without concern over copyright clearance. Point.
Speaker 3: So the you know, the idea of who's making money
Speaker 3: off of Papyrus, the answer is probably no one really,
Speaker 3: you know, after that initial deal, you know, selling the
Speaker 3: rights to it, and then it sort of gets lumped
Speaker 3: in with this list of presets. As we know, fancy
Speaker 3: er font sets are quite expensive because you are paying
Speaker 3: for the rights to be able to use that font
Speaker 3: in whatever commercial designs you might you know, want to.
Speaker 2: Use it in.
Speaker 3: But since Papyra has already pre installed on your system
Speaker 3: and it comes with quote unquote you know, your software
Speaker 3: that you already have, you can use it however you want.
Speaker 3: So it's not like every time someone, you know, I
Speaker 3: don't think that anyone got paid for Papyro is being
Speaker 3: used in the Avatar logo. I would also argue that
Speaker 3: it's possible, I don't know specifically, but that the version
Speaker 3: of Papyrus on the Avatar logo was adjusted or tweaked
Speaker 3: in some way. You can you can you can make
Speaker 3: tweaks to like font sets and stuff and then kind
Speaker 3: of make it your own. But I don't know, Max,
Speaker 3: what do you think, like, do you think if someone
Speaker 3: is using one of these fonts, is there anyone getting
Speaker 3: a check? Are there like font residuals? I'd like to
Speaker 3: answer as well, after you mix, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Probably maybe, But to the thing, it's like, do you
Speaker 4: if you make it just slightly different? So side note,
Speaker 4: I watched the Papiates sketch right before we came on,
Speaker 4: and it Chris Read is playing I guess Ryan Goslin's friend,
Speaker 4: and he's like, hey man, it might have started with Papyrus,
Speaker 4: but it's like slightly different. So I mean, I'm guessing
Speaker 4: that's probably a tricky thing where if you make it
Speaker 4: just different enough and it's probably it's probably just very
Speaker 4: much soaked in minutia.
Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I also like to think that maybe their budget was
Speaker 1: just so close that they said we have to use
Speaker 1: one of the pre installed thoughts. It's down between Papyrus
Speaker 1: and comic Sands. But you know, shout out to Costello.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a really cool guy. He says, I'm
Speaker 1: not embarrassed about this. You know the fact that it's
Speaker 1: one of the world's most widely recognizable fonts. Even if
Speaker 1: that means it's overused, it means there's just as many
Speaker 1: people out there who love it as who hate it.
Speaker 1: And he also says stay humble. I mean, Chris feels
Speaker 1: like a good guy to hang out with, you guys.
Speaker 1: He also says telling people I created Papyrus is always
Speaker 1: a good topic for humorous conversation. It always gets a laugh.
Speaker 1: How can you put a price on that? That's nice, man,
Speaker 1: that's very well adjusted.
Speaker 2: I think excellent conversation starter for sure.
Speaker 3: You know what an interesting thing to Hey, I mean,
Speaker 3: did this guy go on to design any other fonts?
Speaker 2: Is his first one out of the gate? Right?
Speaker 3: Did he try to you know, like, I guess repair
Speaker 3: his repute? I mean, I thought he feels like it's
Speaker 3: a bad reputation. But you know, it seemed like he
Speaker 3: was just sort of a dabbler in font design. I
Speaker 3: gotta wonder, like, is this guy what's he up to now?
Speaker 1: He's got a website Chriscostello dot design, and you can
Speaker 1: see his collection of fonts, which include Blackstone. He also
Speaker 1: has Mirage, letter Press text and Papyrus, and then he
Speaker 1: has one called virus. This is this is a rabbit
Speaker 1: hole to link into, and I think we've we've hit
Speaker 1: some of the big one. Snow will doubtlessly hear from
Speaker 1: our fellow ridiculous historians who have pet peeve fonts of
Speaker 1: their own. But I believe we have to mention, just
Speaker 1: just at least the once, we have to mention how
Speaker 1: wing Dings came about. As as we're wrapping.
Speaker 2: Up this series.
Speaker 1: Wing Dings is the thing that looks like a bunch
Speaker 1: of strange nonsense. You know, it looks like the computer
Speaker 1: is taken over and it doesn't speak your language. But
Speaker 1: according to a great article by Phil Edwards over in Vox,
Speaker 1: why the wing Dings font exists, there are multiple versions
Speaker 1: of wing dings. It's one of the early days of emoji.
Speaker 1: It could give you an image and scale it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, at the very least like clip art, right like
Speaker 3: it was a way. We talked about this a little
Speaker 3: bit in the last episode that it was. Yeah, to
Speaker 3: your point, fonts are also scalable. That's that's a very
Speaker 3: important distinction that you made there, Bend, Because you can
Speaker 3: blow up a font to a massive size and it's
Speaker 3: not going to have any pixelation, right, I mean depending
Speaker 3: on how you are outputting it, like in whatever you know,
Speaker 3: design software you're using. But a font is essentially like
Speaker 3: information telling a computer how to recreate something that is scalable,
Speaker 3: whether it's tiny or whether it's massive. It's not the
Speaker 3: same as like blowing up a low resolution JPEG, which
Speaker 3: of course is going to cause all kinds of you know,
Speaker 3: horrible blurring and pixelation and all that. This is neat
Speaker 3: because these are little individual images. Some of the ones
Speaker 3: that they pull on the vox article or like a
Speaker 3: little hand or a little disc drive, you know, or
Speaker 3: like a floppy disc. Some of them are just little
Speaker 3: symbols like like an X, you know in a circle,
Speaker 3: or you know, certain kind of characters that might be
Speaker 3: look look like runs or something like that. Right, There
Speaker 3: were multiple iterations of wing dings as well. We had
Speaker 3: the og wing dings.
Speaker 2: Which would have like, you know, there's like a OM
Speaker 2: symbol in there.
Speaker 3: There's you know, like a little redical or whatever you
Speaker 3: call it, sort of like the way the Zodiac Killer
Speaker 3: signed you know, his missives to the press. Then you
Speaker 3: had wing dings, two, wingedings three. Then of course, who
Speaker 3: could forget web dings, and then something called zapp ding bats,
Speaker 3: which I'm not familiar with, but that's where you start.
Speaker 3: They do start to resemble like the emojis that we
Speaker 3: know today, like a peace sign, explosions like a little
Speaker 3: you know, kind of a firecracker pop, or things like snowflakes.
Speaker 1: And of course flowers. Charles Bigelow, who's one of the
Speaker 1: co creators of wing dings in its various forms, says
Speaker 1: that his personal favorite will be the floral designs. And
Speaker 1: we want to to squeeze in just a little explanation
Speaker 1: about wing dings.
Speaker 2: What a ride this has been.
Speaker 1: We may have to return to fonts in the future
Speaker 1: because this addresses so many things that we find ridiculous
Speaker 1: about history, right, social dynamics, human psychology, How small things
Speaker 1: can have such an outsized influence. A great time with
Speaker 1: this one, and thanks to super producer mister Max Williams,
Speaker 1: thanks to research associate Jeff I didn't know about the
Speaker 1: impact tattoo.
Speaker 2: Oh I did neither.
Speaker 3: And I just have to add one last little thing
Speaker 3: because I questioned what the deal was with wing ding dingbats.
Speaker 3: Apparently dingbats are actually refer to a particular.
Speaker 2: Type of tool that was used in printing.
Speaker 3: They were small pieces of reusable shapes that could be
Speaker 3: slotted into texts and used like to kind of add
Speaker 3: a little bit of flair to a book printing, think
Speaker 3: about maybe something that might be used in chapter headings,
Speaker 3: or even like page numbers or little kind of bespoke
Speaker 3: like frames on the edge of pages.
Speaker 2: Things like that. They were called dingbats.
Speaker 3: So, you know, the more you know, I love how
Speaker 3: a lot of this stuff, or most of this stuff
Speaker 3: does have references to you know, antiquity into like the
Speaker 3: age that's even pre printing press. And then obviously the
Speaker 3: printing press becomes the earliest form of type setting, and
Speaker 3: then it you know, trans decisions into the computer aid.
Speaker 3: So yeah, now I'm with you, man. This is a
Speaker 3: really really fun topic. And I don't know some of
Speaker 3: these fonts. I think maybe you're a little unfairly maligned.
Speaker 3: I don't hate comic sands. Maybe as much as the
Speaker 3: design community might, none of these really inspire that much
Speaker 3: like ire from me personally. I'm more interested in the
Speaker 3: history and the question of like why certain people hate these,
Speaker 3: So I hope we did a decent job in answering those.
Speaker 4: I don't know if y'all have noticed this, but I
Speaker 4: have been returning emails and comic fans.
Speaker 2: Since I see you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I saw it.
Speaker 2: I saw it.
Speaker 1: And also thanks to you guys for let me include
Speaker 1: what was going to be a wing Ding's Dia tribe.
Speaker 1: But after I had found and read that box article,
Speaker 1: I just really enjoyed the history of it like you
Speaker 1: guys are saying. And thanks of course to Jonathan Strickly
Speaker 1: and aka the Quister Christopher hasiotis here in spirit, Eve's
Speaker 1: Jeff Coat, Gabe Luzier who is killing it over on
Speaker 1: this day in history.
Speaker 3: Class, and of course research Associate extraordinary Jeff Bartlett. Thank
Speaker 3: you for being our sharpa on this font journey. Uh
Speaker 3: and you Ben It's it's been a it's been a
Speaker 3: wild ride.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm. San Seraph all the way. We'll see you
Speaker 2: 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.