It should be seen as a testament to typography that some fonts can make me so anrgy, move me so much to violence, and compell me to gouge my own eyes out with rusty nails. This is an on-going list of those fonts which, if were to be removed from the global collective conscience, would cause me not a moment’s grief.
A list of current offenders:
Ahhh, Comic Sans — loathed my many, used by millions. Designed for Microsoft in 1994 by Vincent Connare, this horrible font, bundled with every Windows-based machine, has been angering people for years, as it is used and misused in a mind-boggling number of ways. I’m sure the history of typography has no shortage of terrible fonts, but few have enraged people so much as Comic Sans, some so angry to even create a unified movement (Ban Comic Sans) to ban it from existence.
To his credit, designer Connare published an explanation of Comic Sans on his site, describing the conditions under which such an abomination was created. To their discredit, Apple, in a moment of confusion and misclarity, created Chalkboard, an almost idential replica of Windows’ Comic Sans. For shame, Apple. For shame!
Oh how I shudder. What was originally intended as a mix of “a traditional roman letterform with the hand-crafted look of highly skilled calligraphy” has turned into a hideously overused typeface. A few of Papyrus designer Chris Costello’s fonts enjoy the same rough-edged treatment, but none have been so over exposed as this one, being the font of choice for most things “new age”, “earthy”, or “foreign” — and rightly so, since the plant it takes it’s name from is described as “woody” and “bluntly triangular”, much like the heads of those who choose this in the most horrific of places.
In contrast, Costello’s Letterpress Text is a nicely dirtied typeface, closely related to Caslon. It features none of the horribly open and wide characters of Papyrus, which looks like someone’s face when their eyes are spaced way too far apart.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I loved Rosewood when it came out. This 18th century-inspired typeface, created by the designer threesome of K.B. Chansler, C. Crossgrove and C. Twombly, has experienced an exponetial growth in overuse in the last year or two, from Old Navy’s dog search to Starbucks signage to fliers commemorating the San Francisco earthquake aboard MUNI vehicles. This overuse has transformed a once palatable font into a heaping pile of cheese.
While both versiosn, Regular and Fill, have been equally abused, I still have little beef with Rosewood Fill. It’s the extreme uniqueness-gone-no-longer-unique nature of Rosewood Regular that earns it a spot on this list.