Let them eat Comic Sans: Typographic aristocracy & democratization

Being a relatively new member of the MyFonts team, I’ve given a lot of thinking lately to the topic of typography as it relates to the “uneducated” designer and popular public taste.

Many, many years ago, when I learned that there was a difference between the “dumb” (ambidextrous) quotes, left behind from the era of the typewriter, and “smart” quotes, I reveled in the position I had acquired amongst those in the know. I could scoff at poor typesetting at the local convenience store or feel smart, passing the new-found knowledge on to my fellow high school classmates. I had climbed up one rung on the social ladder of typography.

Years later, in college, I was sitting in a dark room watching a presentation by one of my professors for a typography class. I was excited to learn some new techniques or be presented a different take on an existing typographic rule. Instead, I found myself somewhat discouraged to find that the majority of the presentation wasn’t much more than a slideshow of the same incorrect use of quotation marks over and over. It was a humorous and entertaining presentation, but when I reviewed my notes afterwards all I found was doodles.

Skip ahead again, this time to the 2005 AIGA National Design Conference. Again I was sitting in a dark room, excited for a stimulating presentation from design guru Ellen Lupton. Ellen had been a teacher of mine in the past, and was phenomenal, plus I enjoy her writing, so naturally I was excited. Again, however, I was somewhat disappointed when a large part of the presentation consisted of every designer in attendance chuckling at examples of naïve typography (the presentation is available for download here).

That’s when it hit me. I looked around the room at all the giggling designers and pondered the fact that, since I was at the conference as a student, I had to watch the presentation remotely on a projection screen in a different room. I was looking up the social design ladder to see an image of the people at the top rung looking down and laughing at the ignorant amateurs who were all the way at the bottom.

Having said all that, I must confess that I am guilty of scoffing. Not so much at naïvety, but more often at things which were considered, but in bad taste (in my opinion). To my dread it always seems to be the things of bad taste which become popular: reality TV, pop music, Thomas Kinkade… the list goes on.

In fact, while in a teleconference the other day, I found a statement my co-worker pointed out to be so true that I wrote it down in my notebook:

The public has appalling taste.

I could not agree more.

The typographic world is not immune to this either. Typefaces pour out endlessly from the desktops of amateur designers who were able to get a pirated copy of FontLab or Fontographer. A majority of them are bound to be horrid and garish to the eyes of a seasoned typophile. Even professional typeface designers often have to look on in horror as the least favorite of their own designs are repeatedly chosen over their most prided work.

But who’s to say what should or shouldn’t be used? What makes the effort to Ban Comic Sans all that different from the Nazi condemnation and banning of certain lettering styles?

Ok, maybe that’s pushing it. But it is worth the thought of whether or not you would support an outright ban of a typeface if it ever was a possibility. (By the way, I do hate Comic Sans. I’m not just defending it because it’s used above the search bar on MyFonts.)

Several days after writing down my co-worker’s statement about the public’s taste (or lack thereof), I came across a quote attributed to Pablo Picasso:

Good taste kills creativity.

I wrote that one down too.

There are several things about MyFonts that offset the horror of seeing Comic Sans on every single page. One of them is the fact that, even if scoffing goes on behind closed doors, every font has an equal chance at success. This fact encourages experimentation (I think), which in turn produces a lot of unpleasant typography. BUT (and that’s a big but), the pot is constantly being stirred. Stagnation subsides and more interesting things happen at a higher frequency.

I’m not quite willing to go as far as signing my name in blood on the post typographic manifesto, but I don’t think non-traditional or even ugly typography should be discouraged.

It is my opinion that no creative endeavor is entirely worthless. Even with the distasteful or “incorrect,” we learn. With so many of these horrors of creation we are presented with questions—intentional or not—that may lead the way to improvements in existing traditions. Indeed, Victor Frankenstein’s Monster taught him more about life than any of his aristocratic friends could have. Let’s not kill ourselves as he did, trying to stamp out our unpleasant creations.

Related links:
• On the Democratization of Type by Gunnar Swanson
• The Antiqua-Fraktur Dispute on Wikipedia
• Typography of the Nineties by Peter Bilak
• The “New” New Typography by Joseph DiGioia
• Post Typographic Manifesto
• The Curse of Comic Sans by Jessica Helfand

A Geek’s Guide to the Magic behind MyFonts

People I talk to are often surprised by two things about MyFonts: the small number of people who run it, and the relatively large number of servers we use to keep the site up and running smoothly.

There are about five guys (and no girls! why is that?) who work on MyFonts full time. In all honesty, though, part of the reason we can survive on such a tight core group is that we borrow a lot of corporate resources from our parent company Bitstream. So all the things we tech geeks consider to be annoying little details (things like accounting departments) are taken care of for us.

We’re all low-grade Renaissance men, dabbling in various areas of site maintenance, although we all have our specialties:

• Two people maintain the actual servers: installing new hardware and software; keeping the database fast and accessible; and designing fancy network topologies to keep things running if any particular piece of hardware decides to die over Christmas holiday.
• Two people devote significant time to answering email support from customers, although we all field questions regularly.
• One person handles installation of new fonts and foundries into the MyFonts database.
• Several part-time specialists lend their skills to international type issues, design, foundry relations, etc.

We all occasionally try out ideas just for fun (I call these “Fun Friday Projects” because my mind tends to wander on Friday afternoons) that end up turning into indispensable site features. An example of this is the RSS feeds that Laurence threw together one weekend when he noticed that several MyFonts pages made natural RSS candidates.

Another interesting fact is that there are now no two MyFonts developers living in the same geographic area; we span the globe from Germany to California. (However, in six days I will be moving from San Diego to Japan, so our time zone range will shift from nine to 16 hours!)

Traffic to the MyFonts web site is increasing all the time, to the point that we now have over 35 servers keeping the site running, including:

• 20 web servers
• 3 database servers
• 4 font-rendering image-generating servers
• 3 WhatTheFont servers
• various administration, development, and special-purpose servers

We’re getting nervous as the servers outnumber us over five to one!

-Chris Lewis, Webmaster

Photo credits:
Left: photo of Chris Lewis at his wedding in 2005 by Adam Twardoch. Photo of MyFonts web servers by Chris Lewis. Composite by Adam Twardoch.
Right: famous photo of British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

July 2006 Rising Stars

Every month we add new, innovative fonts and sign up new foundries. In the July 2006 issue of Rising Stars, we show you our top-selling new fonts.

Hamptons BF is a beautiful new sans-serif named after the well-known New York resort synonymous with style and elegance. Though primarily a display face, Hamptons BF is also suitable for settings of large text. We like the graceful, art deco look of this highly legible typeface design!

Rooted in day-to-day handwriting, Swan Song is a quick and irregular artistic jolt at first impression, and surprisingly richly-textured art at second glance. Swan Song conveys the sense that the communicator is confident, humorous, strong and experienced. We think the reader will be glad to receive the personal contact of such a communicator!

ClickBits is a comprehensive set of web-related icons for online and print applications. If you’re looking for a web 2.0 starburst, icons for your blog, or graphics for your e-commerce app, ClickBits will have what you need!

Eye Catching looks like it was handwritten with a glitter gel pen on pink notebook paper. The font comes with Eye Catching Alts, a separate font with alternate starts, endings, ligatures, and more. The OpenType version includes alternate characters scripted to work automatically in OpenType-savvy applications. With so many alternates, people will be wondering if it’s real handwriting or a font!

Find, try, buy this month’s four Rising Stars

“The Da Vinci Code” font in book and movie titles

Contemplating life with my next wife, the French actress Audrey Tautou, got me thinking about fonts again. Typeface designs used in book titles and movies tend to be overwhelmingly big, bold, and sans serif, but some publishers and studios buck the trend, providing us with some typographic relief. For example the font used in the original hard cover version of The Da Vinci Code book is a big, bold gothic style font:

However, the studios went with a more elegant copperplate gothic font in both the movie poster – which features the lovely Ms. Tautou – and the new mass market paperback edition of the popular novel, featuring a stylistic rendering of the cap “A”:

The font used in the new rendition is similar to “Elan,” which I discovered by uploading the cropped movie poster GIF to WhatTheFont on www.myfonts.com. I like the design of the font. It’s a clean substantial design appropriate for a lofty message.

So I wondered how the title of a recent Oscar-winning movie would look like when rendered with the Elan font, with my own clumsily reworked version of the cap “A” and a similar gradient fill treatment as was done for The Da Vinci Code:

ORIGINAL MOVIE TITLE REVISED MOVIE TITLE

The Da Vinci Code may not be getting the best reviews from the critics, but this critic sure likes the font they use in the movie title! I hope to see more variations from the usual big, bold, sans serif fonts in the future.

Yours in font land,

–Bob Thomas