May 9, 2023 • 34 mins
While many people outside of graphic design may not think about fonts in a conscious manner, it turns out the way a word is depicted can have a huge impact on how you process the information. In the first part of this two-part series, Ben, Noel and Max explore the origins of some of the world's-least favorite fonts.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for tuning in. Let's give it up for the one
and only super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Shut up, Noel.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
What's your favorite font?
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Oh? Papyrus obviously, yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah yeah. If someone asked me, Ben, what's your favorite font,
I gotta tell you I would not have a good
answer I have. We both have a lot of very
accomplished graphic design friends, and I think all three of
us right, and graphic designers are pretty sensitive about fonts.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, for sure. Seraphs. No seraphs, you know, my god,
don't even get me started on turning. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
I briefly sort of had a dalliance working in a
graphic design company doing video stuff, and that's when I
learned terms like like kerning and seraphs. I was just
mainly taking elements that the actual graphic designers did and
then converting them into like after effects animations. You know,
we're text on screen for video type stuff. But anytime
(01:38):
I made any adjustments to things like kerning in the
design they sent me, for whatever reason, they clocked it instantly.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Oh yeah, they got a spidery sense for me. And
there needs to be some sort of discipline right for
this conveyance of information. Look, no matter what language you speak,
no matter where you live, in this wide world of ours,
you are constantly inundated by type, by letters, by messages,
(02:08):
by communication from some other thing to you. We played
a dangerous and a weird game that max you would
love back on stuff they don't want you to know.
We're talking about insidious patterns of advertising. And this was
a number of years ago. We tried to count how
(02:33):
many ads we saw in twenty four hours. Everyone trying
to play this game lost count.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
No one won.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
There are just too many type is everywhere.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
And that speaks to some of the tricksy methods that
go into type setting. I use that as kind of
an outdated term. Perhaps a font would be more the
proper term now in the era of kind of digital
graph design. But in the old days it was called
a type set because it was literally a set of
metal letters that were used on a printing press. You know,
(03:08):
for every single letter that there was a type setter
who had to go in and place those puzzle pieces in,
you know, for every single page of a publication. Right,
But you know, when we're seeing advertisements that make creative
use of fonts, we always come back to Chick fil A.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
You know, think what you will up?
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Their politics whatever their ad campaigns are on point because
they capitalize out a phenomenon that I believe is called disfluency,
where because of their whole misspelling and kind of childlike
handwritten signs, your eyes linger on it longer because it's
sort of a puzzle to solve.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Right, Yeah, just so in the world of Chick fil A,
cows want you to focus your genocidal tendencies on chickens, right,
and so okay, this type is everywhere. Font or typeface
is a crucial part of how we encounter information when
(04:08):
we read it. And if you think back now, just
through your day before you tuned in to this episode,
you will have probably seen multiple different fonts in one
instance or another, and they do affect us psychologically. But
we rarely ask where these fonts came from. What's the providence,
(04:33):
what's their origin story? This is a question that has
haunted our good friend and research associate, Jeff Bartlett. So, Jeff,
this one's this one's for you. He went to the
mat on this. He's in the trenches with us, Sarah
or Sands. This is a two part episode.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Yeah, and we're not just talking about the providence of
every run of the mill type font. We're specifically talking
about fonts that have gotten, for better or worse, a bad.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Reputation, you know, whether from a.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Design perspective, a legibility perspective, or just kind of a
bad taste perspective.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
So we were talking off air.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
The original title of this was stupid fucking fonts Lead
me on that Max, but it changed, you know, because
it's a family show to the fonts we love to hate.
And I was joking when I said Papyrus. There's a
really great that is, you know, among some of the
one of the most hated fonts out there. And there's
(05:32):
an amazing sketch or like a digital short on SNL
with Ryan Gosling where he comes to the realization that
the logo for the multi gazillion dollar grossing film Avatar
from James Cameron. The text is literally just papyrus, which
is kind of this, you know, it's meant to evoke feelings,
(05:54):
I guess of like mystical ancient Egyptian tombs.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
It doesn't even really do to feel like you're reading
a scroll. Yeah, all right, yeah, early early nineties video
games loved it. Lots lots of blogs in the two
thousands loved it.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And in the short he kind of has an existential crisis.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
I'm like, you know, some designer, if you can even
call them that, just highlighted the text and scrolled down
and like a child pulling flowers.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Off of trees as he passes.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Willy Nilly just selected papyrus and hit you know, print.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
And I want to give it a shout out to
my second favorite discourse about fonts, ever, which is from McSweeney's.
All you have to do is, uh, since we're beeping
already in this episode, all you have to do is
type in the phrase I'm comic sands ask yeah, and
(06:53):
you'll be in for a ride. So okay, I said typeface,
I said font. They're a little bit different. Let's clarify
the terminology here with some help from Ashworth. Creative typography
is the art of creating letters that we use every
day in any language. You design them. You decide what
(07:15):
the A or the Z always looks like. And a
font is a collection or set of those things. So
they include the all the little garnishes of this weird
English language, the semi colons, the dashes, the interrogatives and exclamations.
(07:36):
So the typeface is the design you see, it's the
style and look of a specific font. And you know,
you raise a great point there, and Noel, the way
the letters look play such a mission critical role in
how people encounter the thing. Like imagine, okay, I was
(07:56):
thinking about this. Imagine if you woke up one day,
you're driving in traffic and all the road signs are
in papyrus font.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
I would think I was having a stroke and entering
some sort of fugue state.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Most pretentious stop sign ever, it would be disgusted.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Or even even worse or more chaotic would be you know,
comic sands like as the whole world just gone stupid,
you know, like that would be the implication there. Yeah,
it's very interesting, Like the idea of the medium being
the message right one hundred percent contained within the design
(08:39):
aesthetic right of these fonts. There's a certain amount of
intent communicated to the to the consumer, to the to
the viewer, the reader or whatever, you know, whether they're
wanting to an ad campaign or whatever, a sign, let's say,
or a document, you know, like a legal document. They're
going to have style guides, you know, for various law firms,
(08:59):
like in terms of how they space things. You know
that the font they use, you know, what words or
headings are highlighted, you know how, because it's all meant
to convey a sense of professionalism, but also a little
bit of like this is our style. But when you're
doing like let's say, a poster for a movie or
(09:20):
you know, advertisement for a product, are you trying to
convey a sense of fun, excitement, danger perhaps.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Or normality exactly or consequence. So this week we wanted
to hang out and talk about not all fonts, not
(09:48):
the necessarily the history of all fonts hashtag not all fons,
hashtag not all fonts, or hashtag no tall fonts. English
is so weird, it's We wanted to talk about the
fonts that get hated on. We named some of them.
You know, there's this sort of feedback loop in this
(10:10):
the age of ubiquitous communication. Anything that becomes too popular
too quickly inevitably gets haters. So on behalf of these
very hated fonts, We're gonna say condolences to haters. Let's
learn more about their history. Nola, you set up comic
(10:32):
Sands beautifully. Let's talk about comic sands. I can't believe
I'm saying this. I thought originally we're digging in on this.
I thought comic Sans made in nineteen ninety four. That's
pretty recent. And I was politely diplomatically reminded that nineteen
(10:57):
ninety four was a long long time ago.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
It is. Yeah, it's weird to think, right the nineties.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
You know, they're like children now again, say children who
are able to vote and.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Like buy alcohol who were born in the nineties. It's weird, man.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
They just keep you know, we just keep getting older
and they stay the same age. No, they get older too.
Max is well one hundred percent, and there's nothing wrong
with that. Max, go with God.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
We wish you the very best, at least in the
early nineties ninety one. So I'm like, you know, I
had a tape a set player in my car.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Oh, okay, bully for you, young Max, Bully for you.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
You know, why is that? Why is that the street cred?
Speaker 1 (11:35):
You'd have a phonograph in your car?
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Get it? You have an eight track? Come on. But no,
But here's the thing. I mean the nineties.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Of course, you know, as you can see with pop
culture and stuff, anytime a new decade begins, it's basically
kind of a trickle down remnants of the previous decade. So, honestly, Max,
the early nineties still very much felt like the eighties. So, uh,
you're good in my book, buddy, you're good in my book.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
So Comic Sands, there's this guy, his name's Vincent Knarre
con n ar E. He designs Comic Sands, which is
a sort of thicker line for the letters, and it
doesn't have seraphs. You've heard us use the phrase seraph.
A seraf is the little deally bopped yeah, that goes
(12:23):
on the edges of letters in other fonts. Times New
Roman loves a seraph.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
It can kind of make things feel a little more adorned.
Perhaps they're a little more ornamental, or in the case
of Times New Roman, almost give the sense of that
you might have gotten from like a stone cut type
type faces carved.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
That's the idea. Yeah, that's great, that's a good way
to put it. It's just that slight projection, that slight
protuberance off the stroke of a letter.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Yeah, and so it makes me think of something naughty,
I don't know what.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
So so apparently our pal Vinson said, no naughty protuberances
in my thoughts, and this was he designed it based
off the fantastic craft of letterers a hand.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Yeah, comic books in the world, comic comscripts.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Yeah, I mean, if anyone out there's a fanographic novels,
comic books, whatever, you'll know that there is a credited letterer.
And that in comics like for example, in The Sandman,
which I think we all love, the text in the
speech bubbles for Morpheus look a certain way that like
have this kind of dreamy quality like everything he's saying,
(13:45):
Even the bubbles themselves are a little jagged on the edges,
and the text looks like ancient. And then you know,
texts from other speakers might just be more of that
normal kind of that traditional comic lettering, which, like you said,
is very sans Saraphi. But what if we took that
that craft of hand lettering and just kind of slapped
(14:06):
it into a font set and called it a day.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Who's gonna stop us?
Speaker 3 (14:10):
God? Anyway, So some people just want to watch the
world burn, then, right, right agents to chaos.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
So there's an excellent article in the Guardian how we
made the typeface comic Sands, and it has an interview
with our pal Vincent, and Vincent gives first hand reporting
of how he figured this out. He says, I was
working for Microsoft's typography team and they had a lot
(14:37):
of dealings with people from other applications in Karta, which
was a thing, creative writer, which was a thing.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Cardo was Maps, right, I.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Believe, so yeah, Maps Learning, Encyclopedia publisher. And so Vincent's
in this weird situation because all these different stakeholders went
all kinds of different fonts, and he says a lot
of these fonts felt strange and childlike to him. One
program was called Microsoft Bob Bob and here's why.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Here's why.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Apparently Microsoft Bob was a program designed to make computers
more accessible, less intimidating to children. And he he said,
let's give you the quote. He says, I booted it
up and outwalked this cartoon dog talking with a speech
bubble in Times New Roman and then Vincent says, dogs
(15:39):
don't talk in Times New Roman. Conceptually, it made no sense,
which I don't know how to explain it, but I
get it. I don't feel like dogs speak in Times
New Roman.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
No, you're right, absolutely, especially what I guess would be
considered a cartoon dog. Right, a cartoon dog was speaking
the language of cartoons.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah, so we said, yeah, maybe my Senta Stasia is
coming out here, but maybe Vincent has Sena Stasia. But
I totally get it, and I think we all do.
So he says he had this idea to make a
comic style text and he started looking at Dark Knight Returns,
(16:20):
Awesome Watchmen, the graphic novels of the class stations.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
Yeah, Dark Knight Returns is I believe Frank Miller, very cool,
stylized noir, gritty Batman story and obviously Watchman, hugely important
graphic novel series by Alan Moore, The Notorious League, Cranky
and witchy Alan Moore. But again, excellent examples of exactly
what we're talking about in those like using the fonts
(16:44):
and using the hand lettering style in ways to kind
of speak to the characters and their motivations. So, you know,
to our typographer his point, Vincent Kunnair's no, a cartoon
dog wouldn't speak in Times New Romans He's right. Conceptually,
it needed to be something that felt like congruous.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Right mm hmmm, yeah, yeah, and points for congruis though.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
We're having a wordy day, we're having word we're talking
about letters. We're going to drop some words because you know.
It's also remember too that in these these days, these
fonts all had to be installed on your computer, and
they still do to a degree if you're doing design stuff. Now,
you know a lot of things are just rendered graphics
that are like vector based, and you don't necessarily always
(17:29):
have to have the fonts installed to see, you know,
stuff on the internet. You know it might, yeah, but
in these days you absolutely did. And so they had
to create it couldn't just be a design element that
was hard baked into the you know, the actual design.
They had to make something that would be installed on
every system.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
And Vincent says, he's looking at these graphic novels. He
loves the hand lettering, he loves the consistency of it,
and I suspect the disfluency to a larger He says,
I could have just scanned it in and I could
have copied what they were doing, but it felt unethical.
(18:07):
So he looked at specific letters over and over again,
different instances of them, and he mimicked them on his computer.
He didn't sketch it, he said, it was just me
drawing with a mouse, deleting whatever was wrong. And while
he was doing that, he was breaking all the rules
(18:29):
of orthodox typography. So like one of the one of
the old school rules for creating a font or a
typeface is the idea that there should be a certain symmetry.
Your ps are gonna your lower case ps are going
to look like your lowercase cues with just turned in
(18:50):
different directions. And Max, thank you for the hand signals there.
It's sad that we're just an audio show for now.
But Max is doing a great, a great gesture interpretation
of this, and so our buddy Vincent. He says, no,
I like this disfluency. I want I want the P
(19:10):
and the queue to look different. And he doesn't get
there in time for Microsoft Bob, but he says, this
is what's nuts. A lot of people don't know this
about comic Sands. When it first came out, a lot
of people in Microsoft loved it. It felt fun, you know, zippy.
(19:30):
It was bang pal kaboom kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
It kind of made you feel like you were able
to communicate the same sort of excitement and whimsy as
you know comic.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Strips, and and Vincent says, this is not us, This
is coming straight from Vincent. He says, our office administrators
started using the font. Even though it didn't make it
into Microsoft Bob. They started using it in internal email
(20:01):
for birthday parties, for a little get togethers, and comic
Sands was just fun if it, you know, you get
an email, it's in a different font, and it's it's
not asking you to turn in some work. It's not
reminding you about a deadline. It's saying, hey, we're getting
(20:22):
we're getting together. You know, we're gonna have some like
casadillas or something, because that defines a party.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
To me, And uh, ain't no party like a Casadia party,
because the Casadia party goes hot.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yeah, it goes around like a clock. Oh my god,
they're so great. They're so great anyway, So eventually this
becomes so internally popular that they include comic Sands in
Windows ninety five, and Vincent says he begins to see
it everywhere, and then the backlash began.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Yeah, and like it's because, like you said, Ben, anything
that has a sense of over adoption, let's just call it.
You know, it's going to start having some backlash. But
a lot of the backlash also just had to do
with people kind of misusing the font right in ways
that wasn't appropriate. Because remember, like we said, you know,
sometimes that font set is used to communicate like a
(21:26):
certain emotion or idea. So what if, like you said earlier, too, Ben,
all the traffic signs were in comic sands, it would
impart a certain lack of authority to those those things,
you know that you were supposed to fear or at
the very least pay attention to, not a birthday party invitation.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Right right?
Speaker 1 (21:46):
I like that because now we're picturing, I know, all
of us listening today, we're picturing different fonts on traffic signs,
and that is such a trip right now, a Pyrus
comic sands.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Dare I say wing ding?
Speaker 1 (22:03):
People would die?
Speaker 3 (22:05):
I want to know more about the history of wing dings,
who came up with those and who has ever used
them success? I guess they're kind of just early clip
art if you think about it. You know, use the
little pointing hands as borders in your newsletter, whoever it
might be.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Oh, we'll get the wing ding. That might be part two,
but we'll get the wing ding. We want to sew
up comic Sands here real quick. Vincent's a good guy,
smart dude. He made a cool thought. He's proud of it,
but he I don't know. It just stinks to make
something on a lark, something fun, something communicative, and then
(22:44):
have people band together and bond not because they like
what you made, but because they hate it. It didn't
take long for a group called ban Comic Sands to form,
and their whole thing was that they wanted to educate
people about the uses of typeface. Though in their defense
(23:07):
they did They did email Vince earlier and ask him
if it was okay for them to start the group,
and he's so interesting. Yeah, he said it seems silly,
but you know, go nuts with it.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Well, because he cared about the use as well, like
he was very key to There's a really great quote from
him saying, you know, when people use it inappropriately, if
they don't understand how type works, it won't have any
power or meaning to them. He describes a guy at
a roth Coo art show. Rothko, you know who does
a lot of like assembly kind of you know, collage pieces.
(23:41):
And you know, we've always heard, we've heard of this
about this guy. Say I could have done that, you know, yeah,
but you didn't do that. And just because something maybe
seems rough hewn like. For example, Van Go's art style
is very you know, childlike in many ways. But that's
a man who who comes from a background of classical
style painting. He chose stylistically to present the work that
(24:03):
he presented. And the same with Rothko. And that's because
style matters. Style is a communication tool onto itself, beyond
the words that are actually being typed.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
And let's make space for an anecdote that Vincing gives us.
That's so cool. In his personal life, he used comic
Sands one time. He said he was having trouble changing
his broadband provider, so he wrote to them and he
(24:34):
sent the He sent the letter in comic Sands and
it said how disappointed he was, and he got he
got a refund.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
He said, I recommend it for these cases, his basic
theory being the following. He says, typography should not shout,
but comic sands shouts.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
I agree with it.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
I don't know, maybe like should we start sending important emails.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Like at our day Jame memos.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
During this recording, we're gonna We're gonna send No one
is gonna take you seriously.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Max takes me serious. Now, oh come, now you're very seriously.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah, you should see that guy at Monster Jam.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
He's in it.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Uh so, he says that he being Vincent, the creator
of Comic Sands, says that people did take to it
on their own. He said it didn't take any marketing
from Microsoft, and it often gets misused in the creator's opinion,
because someone just digs it they vibe with it. He says, Uh,
(25:50):
you know, he's very clear that Comic Sands is not,
in his opinion appropriate for all things. There was a
slideshow at CERN right like a a deck basically where
they announced the discovery of the Higgs Boson, huge moment
in physics, huge moment in human history. The presentation was
(26:12):
in Comic Sands, and even Vincent, the guy who made
Comic Sands a thing, saw that and thought, hm, tut.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
And that's the thing that's so interesting about this. I
mean this, Vincent is a typographer. You know, he is
someone who is very well read on the rules, you know,
and like you said, Ben, when he was making the font,
he actively ignored those rules on purpose to achieve a result.
And then because it just became so obnoxiously ubiquitous, people
(26:43):
using this font, you know, not really understanding its power.
Like we said, it became hated. And I'll tell you
in particular because of the very reasons that Vincent outlines.
And he knows this particularly hated by designers because they
just find it to be just cliche, and not to
mention that he broke all the rules of the aesthetic
(27:05):
of it, so they just find it to be kind
of just gaudy and just you know, he just it
makes them cringe.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Right, Yeah, it's it's very in vogue to dislike that
font in particular. And we want to give a shout
out to David cadavi Over on design for hackers dot com.
He he knows something I thought was pretty insightful. He
said to he's a Comic Sans hater. Sorry, David, it's fine.
(27:35):
Your opinions are your own. He says that Comic Sans
has poor fundamentals, and he compares it to a much
more beloved font called Helvetica, and Helvetica has like you
can pull these up if you want to play along home.
Helvetica feels much more distinguished, you know, much more more uh,
(28:00):
much more proper. Max obviously hates it. Max is not
a Helvetica guy, uh and and Noel, maybe you could
describe just the vibe of Helvetica. I think when we
talk thoughts, we're talking vibes, right.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
We super are Helvetica is just it's it's very clean, right,
it's very legible. It is also it's it's both clean
and bold. Right, it has this imparts authority to it,
very European. Yeah, he describes it as as such. Though
(28:36):
the strokes of Helvetica's letter forms are unmodulated, some adjustments
are made to improve it legibility. For example, notice how
the stroke on Helvetica gets thinner or the shoulder meets
the stem on this letter and he's like in lowercase
R as well, one hundred percent, So this helps to
give the letter and more even visual weight. Notice how
(28:58):
Comic Sands is this way. If you squit your eyes, though,
there is a disproportionately heavy area where these strokes meet
on Comic Sands. Well, how Vetica's way is more evenly distributed.
The ironic thing about this destinction is that comic Sands
is actually influenced from a drawing tool around felt tipped
pen or marker, but the stroke of the tool is unmodulated. Meanwhile,
(29:23):
the letter forms of Helvetica are rationalized from predecessors without
apparent influence of a drawing tool.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Deep water. Yeah we're in deep water. We're under the
hood on fonts.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
And we're gonna move on to other font surely. But
I just wanted to end this segment. I thought we
could read off a couple of things that might be
on the poster for the Comic Sands Sucks movie.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Yeah, these are coming from pre pressure dot com. How
about we round robin, you can do it.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
Yeah, the AOL of fonts.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Max.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
I can't wait for the sound user gobbet Zip's is
the dirt bastard of the same world.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
An email written in this font makes the sender seem
ridiculous and out of touch.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
I honestly think when I see comics hands that the
person has a lower than average intelligence level.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
It's not that it's a terrible font, it's rather that
it suits non designers far better than those of the
sense of the esthetic with like.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Gol. That's the snobbiest quote I've ever round.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
I don't want to hang out with that person. Can
you imagine them talking about beer or coffee?
Speaker 3 (31:00):
And again, I think we're all fans of design here.
You know, we're all fans of aesthetic, and obviously we
wouldn't like write our emails and comic sands either. But
the level of venom attached to it I find kind
of mind boggling, and I find it performative. It is
a little bit yeah, I think so too, as are
a lot of things, because again, you know, fonts are
(31:21):
designed to do a thing, and I think Jeff did
a fantastic job in finding us some really cool contexts
from the creator himself, who is very much a student
of font of typography, of design, who made this for
a very specific reason that you could argue he did successfully.
But then it's like the way it gets misused and
(31:42):
misappropriated that create the hate.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
And you know what, if anybody listening today, fellow ridiculous historians,
if you are a letterer, if you are a designer,
if you are beefed up with comic sands, you know
all thet to you, We're just giving you the facts.
We also have to point out, in all fairness, folks,
(32:10):
you're obsessed with it, You're fascinated by it. We are
making this a two part episode because we needed to
spend the first part on comic sands.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
I mean, come on, right, no, back me up here.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
Well, not only on comic Sands, but I think we
had to set the stage for the whole larger conversation,
you know, talking a bit about just the history of
fonts and all of that stuff. And then within the
conversation of comic Sans, I think we kind of hopefully
established sort of a bigger framework as to where we're heading.
So we're gonna make part two a little bit more
of a grab bag. So maybe part one would be, like,
(32:47):
you know, fonts we love to hate. Part one the
comic Sans story.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
There we go.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
I also, I've got to figure out a way to
publish this and play with thoughts. I don't know if
we could. I don't know if the technology is there yet,
but if it is, uh, prepare, prepare to be uh.
You know, we hope you give you We give you
a chuckle. We also hope that you tune in for
(33:15):
our further exploration of fonts. Big big thanks to super
producer mister Max wing Ding Williams, Big big thanks to
our research associate Jeff San Sarah Bartlett. I'm just I'm
passing out font nicknames, NOL, what do you what's a
good win for Jonathan Strickland got.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
To be Oh, the put me on the spot. I
don't know enough fought names. I'm not a font nerd.
I'm excited to to dig into some more though, on
the next episode. We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for tuning in. Let's give it up for the one
and only super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Shut up, Noel.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
What's your favorite font?
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Oh? Papyrus obviously, yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah yeah. If someone asked me, Ben, what's your favorite font,
I gotta tell you I would not have a good
answer I have. We both have a lot of very
accomplished graphic design friends, and I think all three of
us right, and graphic designers are pretty sensitive about fonts.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, for sure. Seraphs. No seraphs, you know, my god,
don't even get me started on turning. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
I briefly sort of had a dalliance working in a
graphic design company doing video stuff, and that's when I
learned terms like like kerning and seraphs. I was just
mainly taking elements that the actual graphic designers did and
then converting them into like after effects animations. You know,
we're text on screen for video type stuff. But anytime
(01:38):
I made any adjustments to things like kerning in the
design they sent me, for whatever reason, they clocked it instantly.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Oh yeah, they got a spidery sense for me. And
there needs to be some sort of discipline right for
this conveyance of information. Look, no matter what language you speak,
no matter where you live, in this wide world of ours,
you are constantly inundated by type, by letters, by messages,
(02:08):
by communication from some other thing to you. We played
a dangerous and a weird game that max you would
love back on stuff they don't want you to know.
We're talking about insidious patterns of advertising. And this was
a number of years ago. We tried to count how
(02:33):
many ads we saw in twenty four hours. Everyone trying
to play this game lost count.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
No one won.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
There are just too many type is everywhere.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
And that speaks to some of the tricksy methods that
go into type setting. I use that as kind of
an outdated term. Perhaps a font would be more the
proper term now in the era of kind of digital
graph design. But in the old days it was called
a type set because it was literally a set of
metal letters that were used on a printing press. You know,
(03:08):
for every single letter that there was a type setter
who had to go in and place those puzzle pieces in,
you know, for every single page of a publication. Right,
But you know, when we're seeing advertisements that make creative
use of fonts, we always come back to Chick fil A.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
You know, think what you will up?
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Their politics whatever their ad campaigns are on point because
they capitalize out a phenomenon that I believe is called disfluency,
where because of their whole misspelling and kind of childlike
handwritten signs, your eyes linger on it longer because it's
sort of a puzzle to solve.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Right, Yeah, just so in the world of Chick fil A,
cows want you to focus your genocidal tendencies on chickens, right,
and so okay, this type is everywhere. Font or typeface
is a crucial part of how we encounter information when
(04:08):
we read it. And if you think back now, just
through your day before you tuned in to this episode,
you will have probably seen multiple different fonts in one
instance or another, and they do affect us psychologically. But
we rarely ask where these fonts came from. What's the providence,
(04:33):
what's their origin story? This is a question that has
haunted our good friend and research associate, Jeff Bartlett. So, Jeff,
this one's this one's for you. He went to the
mat on this. He's in the trenches with us, Sarah
or Sands. This is a two part episode.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Yeah, and we're not just talking about the providence of
every run of the mill type font. We're specifically talking
about fonts that have gotten, for better or worse, a bad.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Reputation, you know, whether from a.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Design perspective, a legibility perspective, or just kind of a
bad taste perspective.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
So we were talking off air.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
The original title of this was stupid fucking fonts Lead
me on that Max, but it changed, you know, because
it's a family show to the fonts we love to hate.
And I was joking when I said Papyrus. There's a
really great that is, you know, among some of the
one of the most hated fonts out there. And there's
(05:32):
an amazing sketch or like a digital short on SNL
with Ryan Gosling where he comes to the realization that
the logo for the multi gazillion dollar grossing film Avatar
from James Cameron. The text is literally just papyrus, which
is kind of this, you know, it's meant to evoke feelings,
(05:54):
I guess of like mystical ancient Egyptian tombs.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
It doesn't even really do to feel like you're reading
a scroll. Yeah, all right, yeah, early early nineties video
games loved it. Lots lots of blogs in the two
thousands loved it.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And in the short he kind of has an existential crisis.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
I'm like, you know, some designer, if you can even
call them that, just highlighted the text and scrolled down
and like a child pulling flowers.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Off of trees as he passes.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Willy Nilly just selected papyrus and hit you know, print.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
And I want to give it a shout out to
my second favorite discourse about fonts, ever, which is from McSweeney's.
All you have to do is, uh, since we're beeping
already in this episode, all you have to do is
type in the phrase I'm comic sands ask yeah, and
(06:53):
you'll be in for a ride. So okay, I said typeface,
I said font. They're a little bit different. Let's clarify
the terminology here with some help from Ashworth. Creative typography
is the art of creating letters that we use every
day in any language. You design them. You decide what
(07:15):
the A or the Z always looks like. And a
font is a collection or set of those things. So
they include the all the little garnishes of this weird
English language, the semi colons, the dashes, the interrogatives and exclamations.
(07:36):
So the typeface is the design you see, it's the
style and look of a specific font. And you know,
you raise a great point there, and Noel, the way
the letters look play such a mission critical role in
how people encounter the thing. Like imagine, okay, I was
(07:56):
thinking about this. Imagine if you woke up one day,
you're driving in traffic and all the road signs are
in papyrus font.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
I would think I was having a stroke and entering
some sort of fugue state.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Most pretentious stop sign ever, it would be disgusted.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Or even even worse or more chaotic would be you know,
comic sands like as the whole world just gone stupid,
you know, like that would be the implication there. Yeah,
it's very interesting, Like the idea of the medium being
the message right one hundred percent contained within the design
(08:39):
aesthetic right of these fonts. There's a certain amount of
intent communicated to the to the consumer, to the to
the viewer, the reader or whatever, you know, whether they're
wanting to an ad campaign or whatever, a sign, let's say,
or a document, you know, like a legal document. They're
going to have style guides, you know, for various law firms,
(08:59):
like in terms of how they space things. You know
that the font they use, you know, what words or
headings are highlighted, you know how, because it's all meant
to convey a sense of professionalism, but also a little
bit of like this is our style. But when you're
doing like let's say, a poster for a movie or
(09:20):
you know, advertisement for a product, are you trying to
convey a sense of fun, excitement, danger perhaps.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Or normality exactly or consequence. So this week we wanted
to hang out and talk about not all fonts, not
(09:48):
the necessarily the history of all fonts hashtag not all fons,
hashtag not all fonts, or hashtag no tall fonts. English
is so weird, it's We wanted to talk about the
fonts that get hated on. We named some of them.
You know, there's this sort of feedback loop in this
(10:10):
the age of ubiquitous communication. Anything that becomes too popular
too quickly inevitably gets haters. So on behalf of these
very hated fonts, We're gonna say condolences to haters. Let's
learn more about their history. Nola, you set up comic
(10:32):
Sands beautifully. Let's talk about comic sands. I can't believe
I'm saying this. I thought originally we're digging in on this.
I thought comic Sans made in nineteen ninety four. That's
pretty recent. And I was politely diplomatically reminded that nineteen
(10:57):
ninety four was a long long time ago.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
It is. Yeah, it's weird to think, right the nineties.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
You know, they're like children now again, say children who
are able to vote and.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Like buy alcohol who were born in the nineties. It's weird, man.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
They just keep you know, we just keep getting older
and they stay the same age. No, they get older too.
Max is well one hundred percent, and there's nothing wrong
with that. Max, go with God.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
We wish you the very best, at least in the
early nineties ninety one. So I'm like, you know, I
had a tape a set player in my car.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Oh, okay, bully for you, young Max, Bully for you.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
You know, why is that? Why is that the street cred?
Speaker 1 (11:35):
You'd have a phonograph in your car?
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Get it? You have an eight track? Come on. But no,
But here's the thing. I mean the nineties.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Of course, you know, as you can see with pop
culture and stuff, anytime a new decade begins, it's basically
kind of a trickle down remnants of the previous decade. So, honestly, Max,
the early nineties still very much felt like the eighties. So, uh,
you're good in my book, buddy, you're good in my book.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
So Comic Sands, there's this guy, his name's Vincent Knarre
con n ar E. He designs Comic Sands, which is
a sort of thicker line for the letters, and it
doesn't have seraphs. You've heard us use the phrase seraph.
A seraf is the little deally bopped yeah, that goes
(12:23):
on the edges of letters in other fonts. Times New
Roman loves a seraph.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
It can kind of make things feel a little more adorned.
Perhaps they're a little more ornamental, or in the case
of Times New Roman, almost give the sense of that
you might have gotten from like a stone cut type
type faces carved.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
That's the idea. Yeah, that's great, that's a good way
to put it. It's just that slight projection, that slight
protuberance off the stroke of a letter.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Yeah, and so it makes me think of something naughty,
I don't know what.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
So so apparently our pal Vinson said, no naughty protuberances
in my thoughts, and this was he designed it based
off the fantastic craft of letterers a hand.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Yeah, comic books in the world, comic comscripts.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Yeah, I mean, if anyone out there's a fanographic novels,
comic books, whatever, you'll know that there is a credited letterer.
And that in comics like for example, in The Sandman,
which I think we all love, the text in the
speech bubbles for Morpheus look a certain way that like
have this kind of dreamy quality like everything he's saying,
(13:45):
Even the bubbles themselves are a little jagged on the edges,
and the text looks like ancient. And then you know,
texts from other speakers might just be more of that
normal kind of that traditional comic lettering, which, like you said,
is very sans Saraphi. But what if we took that
that craft of hand lettering and just kind of slapped
(14:06):
it into a font set and called it a day.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Who's gonna stop us?
Speaker 3 (14:10):
God? Anyway, So some people just want to watch the
world burn, then, right, right agents to chaos.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
So there's an excellent article in the Guardian how we
made the typeface comic Sands, and it has an interview
with our pal Vincent, and Vincent gives first hand reporting
of how he figured this out. He says, I was
working for Microsoft's typography team and they had a lot
(14:37):
of dealings with people from other applications in Karta, which
was a thing, creative writer, which was a thing.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Cardo was Maps, right, I.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Believe, so yeah, Maps Learning, Encyclopedia publisher. And so Vincent's
in this weird situation because all these different stakeholders went
all kinds of different fonts, and he says a lot
of these fonts felt strange and childlike to him. One
program was called Microsoft Bob Bob and here's why.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Here's why.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Apparently Microsoft Bob was a program designed to make computers
more accessible, less intimidating to children. And he he said,
let's give you the quote. He says, I booted it
up and outwalked this cartoon dog talking with a speech
bubble in Times New Roman and then Vincent says, dogs
(15:39):
don't talk in Times New Roman. Conceptually, it made no sense,
which I don't know how to explain it, but I
get it. I don't feel like dogs speak in Times
New Roman.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
No, you're right, absolutely, especially what I guess would be
considered a cartoon dog. Right, a cartoon dog was speaking
the language of cartoons.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah, so we said, yeah, maybe my Senta Stasia is
coming out here, but maybe Vincent has Sena Stasia. But
I totally get it, and I think we all do.
So he says he had this idea to make a
comic style text and he started looking at Dark Knight Returns,
(16:20):
Awesome Watchmen, the graphic novels of the class stations.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
Yeah, Dark Knight Returns is I believe Frank Miller, very cool,
stylized noir, gritty Batman story and obviously Watchman, hugely important
graphic novel series by Alan Moore, The Notorious League, Cranky
and witchy Alan Moore. But again, excellent examples of exactly
what we're talking about in those like using the fonts
(16:44):
and using the hand lettering style in ways to kind
of speak to the characters and their motivations. So, you know,
to our typographer his point, Vincent Kunnair's no, a cartoon
dog wouldn't speak in Times New Romans He's right. Conceptually,
it needed to be something that felt like congruous.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Right mm hmmm, yeah, yeah, and points for congruis though.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
We're having a wordy day, we're having word we're talking
about letters. We're going to drop some words because you know.
It's also remember too that in these these days, these
fonts all had to be installed on your computer, and
they still do to a degree if you're doing design stuff. Now,
you know a lot of things are just rendered graphics
that are like vector based, and you don't necessarily always
(17:29):
have to have the fonts installed to see, you know,
stuff on the internet. You know it might, yeah, but
in these days you absolutely did. And so they had
to create it couldn't just be a design element that
was hard baked into the you know, the actual design.
They had to make something that would be installed on
every system.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
And Vincent says, he's looking at these graphic novels. He
loves the hand lettering, he loves the consistency of it,
and I suspect the disfluency to a larger He says,
I could have just scanned it in and I could
have copied what they were doing, but it felt unethical.
(18:07):
So he looked at specific letters over and over again,
different instances of them, and he mimicked them on his computer.
He didn't sketch it, he said, it was just me
drawing with a mouse, deleting whatever was wrong. And while
he was doing that, he was breaking all the rules
(18:29):
of orthodox typography. So like one of the one of
the old school rules for creating a font or a
typeface is the idea that there should be a certain symmetry.
Your ps are gonna your lower case ps are going
to look like your lowercase cues with just turned in
(18:50):
different directions. And Max, thank you for the hand signals there.
It's sad that we're just an audio show for now.
But Max is doing a great, a great gesture interpretation
of this, and so our buddy Vincent. He says, no,
I like this disfluency. I want I want the P
(19:10):
and the queue to look different. And he doesn't get
there in time for Microsoft Bob, but he says, this
is what's nuts. A lot of people don't know this
about comic Sands. When it first came out, a lot
of people in Microsoft loved it. It felt fun, you know, zippy.
(19:30):
It was bang pal kaboom kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
It kind of made you feel like you were able
to communicate the same sort of excitement and whimsy as
you know comic.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Strips, and and Vincent says, this is not us, This
is coming straight from Vincent. He says, our office administrators
started using the font. Even though it didn't make it
into Microsoft Bob. They started using it in internal email
(20:01):
for birthday parties, for a little get togethers, and comic
Sands was just fun if it, you know, you get
an email, it's in a different font, and it's it's
not asking you to turn in some work. It's not
reminding you about a deadline. It's saying, hey, we're getting
(20:22):
we're getting together. You know, we're gonna have some like
casadillas or something, because that defines a party.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
To me, And uh, ain't no party like a Casadia party,
because the Casadia party goes hot.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yeah, it goes around like a clock. Oh my god,
they're so great. They're so great anyway, So eventually this
becomes so internally popular that they include comic Sands in
Windows ninety five, and Vincent says he begins to see
it everywhere, and then the backlash began.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Yeah, and like it's because, like you said, Ben, anything
that has a sense of over adoption, let's just call it.
You know, it's going to start having some backlash. But
a lot of the backlash also just had to do
with people kind of misusing the font right in ways
that wasn't appropriate. Because remember, like we said, you know,
sometimes that font set is used to communicate like a
(21:26):
certain emotion or idea. So what if, like you said earlier, too, Ben,
all the traffic signs were in comic sands, it would
impart a certain lack of authority to those those things,
you know that you were supposed to fear or at
the very least pay attention to, not a birthday party invitation.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Right right?
Speaker 1 (21:46):
I like that because now we're picturing, I know, all
of us listening today, we're picturing different fonts on traffic signs,
and that is such a trip right now, a Pyrus
comic sands.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Dare I say wing ding?
Speaker 1 (22:03):
People would die?
Speaker 3 (22:05):
I want to know more about the history of wing dings,
who came up with those and who has ever used
them success? I guess they're kind of just early clip
art if you think about it. You know, use the
little pointing hands as borders in your newsletter, whoever it
might be.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Oh, we'll get the wing ding. That might be part two,
but we'll get the wing ding. We want to sew
up comic Sands here real quick. Vincent's a good guy,
smart dude. He made a cool thought. He's proud of it,
but he I don't know. It just stinks to make
something on a lark, something fun, something communicative, and then
(22:44):
have people band together and bond not because they like
what you made, but because they hate it. It didn't
take long for a group called ban Comic Sands to form,
and their whole thing was that they wanted to educate
people about the uses of typeface. Though in their defense
(23:07):
they did They did email Vince earlier and ask him
if it was okay for them to start the group,
and he's so interesting. Yeah, he said it seems silly,
but you know, go nuts with it.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Well, because he cared about the use as well, like
he was very key to There's a really great quote from
him saying, you know, when people use it inappropriately, if
they don't understand how type works, it won't have any
power or meaning to them. He describes a guy at
a roth Coo art show. Rothko, you know who does
a lot of like assembly kind of you know, collage pieces.
(23:41):
And you know, we've always heard, we've heard of this
about this guy. Say I could have done that, you know, yeah,
but you didn't do that. And just because something maybe
seems rough hewn like. For example, Van Go's art style
is very you know, childlike in many ways. But that's
a man who who comes from a background of classical
style painting. He chose stylistically to present the work that
(24:03):
he presented. And the same with Rothko. And that's because
style matters. Style is a communication tool onto itself, beyond
the words that are actually being typed.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
And let's make space for an anecdote that Vincing gives us.
That's so cool. In his personal life, he used comic
Sands one time. He said he was having trouble changing
his broadband provider, so he wrote to them and he
(24:34):
sent the He sent the letter in comic Sands and
it said how disappointed he was, and he got he
got a refund.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
He said, I recommend it for these cases, his basic
theory being the following. He says, typography should not shout,
but comic sands shouts.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
I agree with it.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
I don't know, maybe like should we start sending important emails.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Like at our day Jame memos.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
During this recording, we're gonna We're gonna send No one
is gonna take you seriously.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Max takes me serious. Now, oh come, now you're very seriously.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah, you should see that guy at Monster Jam.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
He's in it.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Uh so, he says that he being Vincent, the creator
of Comic Sands, says that people did take to it
on their own. He said it didn't take any marketing
from Microsoft, and it often gets misused in the creator's opinion,
because someone just digs it they vibe with it. He says, Uh,
(25:50):
you know, he's very clear that Comic Sands is not,
in his opinion appropriate for all things. There was a
slideshow at CERN right like a a deck basically where
they announced the discovery of the Higgs Boson, huge moment
in physics, huge moment in human history. The presentation was
(26:12):
in Comic Sands, and even Vincent, the guy who made
Comic Sands a thing, saw that and thought, hm, tut.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
And that's the thing that's so interesting about this. I
mean this, Vincent is a typographer. You know, he is
someone who is very well read on the rules, you know,
and like you said, Ben, when he was making the font,
he actively ignored those rules on purpose to achieve a result.
And then because it just became so obnoxiously ubiquitous, people
(26:43):
using this font, you know, not really understanding its power.
Like we said, it became hated. And I'll tell you
in particular because of the very reasons that Vincent outlines.
And he knows this particularly hated by designers because they
just find it to be just cliche, and not to
mention that he broke all the rules of the aesthetic
(27:05):
of it, so they just find it to be kind
of just gaudy and just you know, he just it
makes them cringe.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Right, Yeah, it's it's very in vogue to dislike that
font in particular. And we want to give a shout
out to David cadavi Over on design for hackers dot com.
He he knows something I thought was pretty insightful. He
said to he's a Comic Sans hater. Sorry, David, it's fine.
(27:35):
Your opinions are your own. He says that Comic Sans
has poor fundamentals, and he compares it to a much
more beloved font called Helvetica, and Helvetica has like you
can pull these up if you want to play along home.
Helvetica feels much more distinguished, you know, much more more uh,
(28:00):
much more proper. Max obviously hates it. Max is not
a Helvetica guy, uh and and Noel, maybe you could
describe just the vibe of Helvetica. I think when we
talk thoughts, we're talking vibes, right.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
We super are Helvetica is just it's it's very clean, right,
it's very legible. It is also it's it's both clean
and bold. Right, it has this imparts authority to it,
very European. Yeah, he describes it as as such. Though
(28:36):
the strokes of Helvetica's letter forms are unmodulated, some adjustments
are made to improve it legibility. For example, notice how
the stroke on Helvetica gets thinner or the shoulder meets
the stem on this letter and he's like in lowercase
R as well, one hundred percent, So this helps to
give the letter and more even visual weight. Notice how
(28:58):
Comic Sands is this way. If you squit your eyes, though,
there is a disproportionately heavy area where these strokes meet
on Comic Sands. Well, how Vetica's way is more evenly distributed.
The ironic thing about this destinction is that comic Sands
is actually influenced from a drawing tool around felt tipped
pen or marker, but the stroke of the tool is unmodulated. Meanwhile,
(29:23):
the letter forms of Helvetica are rationalized from predecessors without
apparent influence of a drawing tool.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Deep water. Yeah we're in deep water. We're under the
hood on fonts.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
And we're gonna move on to other font surely. But
I just wanted to end this segment. I thought we
could read off a couple of things that might be
on the poster for the Comic Sands Sucks movie.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Yeah, these are coming from pre pressure dot com. How
about we round robin, you can do it.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
Yeah, the AOL of fonts.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Max.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
I can't wait for the sound user gobbet Zip's is
the dirt bastard of the same world.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
An email written in this font makes the sender seem
ridiculous and out of touch.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
I honestly think when I see comics hands that the
person has a lower than average intelligence level.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
It's not that it's a terrible font, it's rather that
it suits non designers far better than those of the
sense of the esthetic with like.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Gol. That's the snobbiest quote I've ever round.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
I don't want to hang out with that person. Can
you imagine them talking about beer or coffee?
Speaker 3 (31:00):
And again, I think we're all fans of design here.
You know, we're all fans of aesthetic, and obviously we
wouldn't like write our emails and comic sands either. But
the level of venom attached to it I find kind
of mind boggling, and I find it performative. It is
a little bit yeah, I think so too, as are
a lot of things, because again, you know, fonts are
(31:21):
designed to do a thing, and I think Jeff did
a fantastic job in finding us some really cool contexts
from the creator himself, who is very much a student
of font of typography, of design, who made this for
a very specific reason that you could argue he did successfully.
But then it's like the way it gets misused and
(31:42):
misappropriated that create the hate.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
And you know what, if anybody listening today, fellow ridiculous historians,
if you are a letterer, if you are a designer,
if you are beefed up with comic sands, you know
all thet to you, We're just giving you the facts.
We also have to point out, in all fairness, folks,
(32:10):
you're obsessed with it, You're fascinated by it. We are
making this a two part episode because we needed to
spend the first part on comic sands.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
I mean, come on, right, no, back me up here.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
Well, not only on comic Sands, but I think we
had to set the stage for the whole larger conversation,
you know, talking a bit about just the history of
fonts and all of that stuff. And then within the
conversation of comic Sans, I think we kind of hopefully
established sort of a bigger framework as to where we're heading.
So we're gonna make part two a little bit more
of a grab bag. So maybe part one would be, like,
(32:47):
you know, fonts we love to hate. Part one the
comic Sans story.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
There we go.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
I also, I've got to figure out a way to
publish this and play with thoughts. I don't know if
we could. I don't know if the technology is there yet,
but if it is, uh, prepare, prepare to be uh.
You know, we hope you give you We give you
a chuckle. We also hope that you tune in for
(33:15):
our further exploration of fonts. Big big thanks to super
producer mister Max wing Ding Williams, Big big thanks to
our research associate Jeff San Sarah Bartlett. I'm just I'm
passing out font nicknames, NOL, what do you what's a
good win for Jonathan Strickland got.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
To be Oh, the put me on the spot. I
don't know enough fought names. I'm not a font nerd.
I'm excited to to dig into some more though, on
the next episode. We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.