Are you an Arial person? A Times New Roman? A Garamond? A Lucida Handwriting? So much of our communication is expressed in text these days that people become deeply attached to the typeface they use to type out their thoughts. Bold or unbold, serif or sans-serif — like the car you drive or the clothes you wear, your font expresses who you are ... and can go in and out of style.
"Type, like fashion and music, comes in and out of vogue," Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type, tells NPR's Audie Cornish. So what's in right now? "I think now script fonts are making a comeback," he says.
Fonts didn't always hold such a significant spot in the cultural imagination. Before personal computers, type looked largely the same. "Everything basically looked like the typewriter font," Garfield says. "It was a liberating thing in the '80s" when it became possible to manipulate fonts with the click of a mouse.
But with great power comes great responsibility ... and some didn't use their typeface forces for good. To wit: Comic Sans. If you've ever printed signs to advertise a yard sale or sent invitations to your child's birthday party, chances are you've employed the wildly popular Comic Sans. The playful letters became so overused that it inspired a backlash. Garfield is hardly a fan, but he comes to Comic Sans' defense.
"The key thing with Comic Sans and with all fonts is really the use to which it's put," he says. "If you used it ... to invite people to your school fair, that was great. [It was] not so great, however, when it began appearing on the sides of ambulances and gravestones." Garfield recalls one member of the Ban Comic Sans "movement" saying: "If you use it in the wrong place it's like inviting a clown to a funeral."
Traditional Arabic ***** all over those lessor fonts.
Arabic is so beautiful. My grandmother speaks it and when I went to Tunisia I got some henna tattoos in Arabic, they were gorgeous but I'd never get a permanent one...you never know just what they'd write on you...
