If they use Papyrus too, this may become an obsession after all. Except that, as Ryan’s therapist points out, there are sequels coming. Or more likely, it’s already been talked to death and we should just drop it. Why not keep it? Did James say to lose it and go with a lightly modified version of a font notorious for being used exactly in this way - as a boring default selected by the design-unconscious? Maybe it is some off-the shelf stencil font, but it looks good - all the letter cuts point the same direction, you have overlap between the letters that’s very suited to their shapes, and so on. Now, that’s not the greatest title type of all time (that would be Alien or everything by Saul Bass), but it’s pretty neat. Sure, they tweaked it a bit, but as Gosling points out: “IT WASN’T ENOUGH.”īut what bugs me even more is that the movie already had an earlier poster with a cool bit of type on it. Papyrus was indeed already overused in 2009, when the movie came out, and it would have been mocked regardless. I may not think about it every day like my friend Ryan, but it did bother me quite a bit at the time. While everyone sees Papyrus (or its knockoff version, Parchment) on aromatherapy bars, Indian restaurants, bumper stickers and so on, the final word on misuse definitely goes to James Cameron’s Avatar. He made a solid font and people who don’t know any better have, in their naiveté, adopted it unquestioningly. Like the creator of Comic Sans, Costello isn’t to be blamed here. It was not my intent to be used for everything - it’s way overused.” “So that’s when I began to see it turn up everywhere: mortgage ads, construction logos. “It ended up being a default font set on every computer since 2000,” he continued. “If I can take this time to apologize to my brother and sister graphic designers… I’m a graphic designer as well, I’m an illustrator… I believe it’s a well-designed font.” I believe the leading reasons that Papyrus is so awful are that it is a pre-distressed font, which just as in clothing is always bad. Helvetica is used far more often and still holds its own for its proper use case. “I took a look at it and me and my wife were like cracking up,” he said. I actually disagree that overuse is the leading reason that Papyrus is bad. Speaking to CBS News, he explained that he woke up to an inbox full of people telling him that the font, which he made around the turn of the century, had been the subject of SNL’s good-natured ribbing. And his SNL bit obsessing over the font’s frequent inappropriate use (particularly in the movie Avatar) has prompted Papyrus’s creator, Chris Costello, to address the issue. If you’re like me, whenever you see a sign that uses the most overworked font in the world, you point it out and yell “Papyrus!” You probably aren’t like me.
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