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How Fonts Are Fueling the Culture Wars (backchannel.com) 224

Reader mirandakatz writes: Typography is having a bit of a moment: Suddenly, tons of people who don't work in design have all sorts of opinions about it, and are taking every opportunity to point out poor font choices and smaller design elements. But they're missing the bigger picture. As Medium designer Ben Hersh writes at Backchannel, typography isn't just catchy visuals: It can also be dangerous. As Hersh writes, 'Typography can silently influence: It can signify dangerous ideas, normalize dictatorships, and sever broken nations. In some cases it may be a matter of life and death. And it can do this as powerfully as the words it depicts.' Don't believe him? He's got ample visual examples to prove it.
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How Fonts Are Fueling the Culture Wars

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  • Comic Sans (Score:5, Funny)

    by lactose99 ( 71132 ) on Monday May 22, 2017 @03:03PM (#54465273)

    Make everything Comic Sans, problem solved!

    • God help us.

    • I don't know why everyone hates comic sans... maybe it was just overused and everyone just got sick of it... but I find it very easy to read. Some of the more fancy and embellished fonts are much harder to read.
      • Re:Comic Sans (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22, 2017 @03:58PM (#54465697)

        I don't know why everyone hates comic sans...

        As with everything, it's Microsoft's fault. /s

        In the mid/late 90s, the PC revolution meant that Microsoft Word became ubiquitous. Word made it easy to put together a "publication ready" document. Now, instead of having publishing software and tools in the hands of an elite group of users, steeped in the craft of typography, anyone with a computer could do it.

        But Word didn't present these new users with any of the arcane knowledge of when to use which font that typography experts had. No one was teaching them the significance of serif versus sans serif. It didn't talk about the cultural implications of humanist typefaces. -- No, it just presented a simple drop-down box containing every font on the system, and left it to the user to pick one that they wanted, with little to no guidance.

        Combined with this is the advent of the Internet for the masses, and particularly in Internet standardization. Comic Sans was one of the fonts picked as a standard web font -- and for good reason! It's very useful for short text in comic-like settings. That's what it was designed for - a font that could be used in dialog bubbles in computer-produced versions of things like Batman and Spiderman comics. The early web standardizers saw the use of such a font for various things on the internet, like info boxes and captions, etc. It wasn't intended as the main font on a primarily-text document, but if it wasn't included in the standard, you couldn't count on it for even the odd usage.

        But all this consideration was lost on the users of Word - no one bothered to tell them what the intent of the font was, or give them any information or guidance in picking the font they want to use(1). Nope. Users were forced to randomly try fonts, and pick what they thought was best. And since they were (*sniff*) "the masses", they picked what they thought looked nice. All the esoteric considerations that knowledgeable typography experts apply are thrown out the window. And Comic Sans *does* look nice - in small doses (which is all you get when you have novices trying fonts out). Also, when compared to the other fonts you had available at the time, it stood out. (Let's be honest: from a high-level perspective, there's not much difference between Times New Roman and Garamond. You'd have to be a typography expert to explain in which situations you'd prefer one over the other.)

        So a large number of people picked Comic Sans, thinking they were being sophisticated by not leaving Word to use the default typeface. This lead to the use of Comic Sans in a number of situations where it was just not done, according to the typography elite. It quickly became a way to separate those with typographical sophistication from the hoi polloi. We can all get together and laugh at the naiveté of those uncouth barbarians who pick Comic Sans. We all get behind a movement to Ban Comic Sans as a form of virtue signalling. Being against Comic Sans is not so much about having objections about the use of the font (which, don't get me wrong, there *are* valid reasons for), but about associating yourself with the type of people who are against the font (i.e. the literate, learned, cultured people who care about typefaces).

        tl;dr - People hate Comic Sans because Microsoft eliminated the barrier to entry in publishing for people without typographical knowledge.

        1) Heck, even today, with all the typography snobs running around, no one has really put together a good "so you know nothing about typography, but want to pick a font" guide -- well, except for the guides which are a one liner: "Use Helvetica."

        • by xevioso ( 598654 )

          No. People hate comic sans because it looks like a child's version of a font. Hell, the name itself, "COMIC sans" indicates it's not to be taken seriously. It's used in the real world to indicate whimsy or something pedestrian such as a sign on a door of a church that might say "Don't forget to bring a dish for the potluck this Sunday morning at 11!" and that's perfectly fine.

          When you are trying to get someone to invest in something called the "The Chappaquiddick Binomial Integrity Fund II" or something,

          • No. People hate comic sans because it looks like a child's version of a font.

            I'm seeing a lot of "Idiots misuse comic sans, therefore comic sans is bad."

            Hitler was a vegetarian, you know.

            • by Rande ( 255599 )

              And against smoking. It took decades longer for Germany and Japan to even start cracking down on smokers because whenever it was brought up, it was 'yeah, Hitler was against smoking too'.

              • Which just shows that he wasn't entirely bad.

                But I can't help wondering about if his real revenge came through the VW bug, one of the more dangerous cars ever made.

          • It was supposed to be named Cosmic Sense, but somewhere along the line a comedian got a hold of it...

        • Re:Comic Sans (Score:4, Informative)

          by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Monday May 22, 2017 @04:41PM (#54466043) Homepage Journal

          It quickly became a way to separate those with typographical sophistication from the hoi polloi.

          "The hoi polloi" is like saying "the La Brea tar pits" or "The big Rio Grande river".

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            "The hoi polloi" is like saying "the La Brea tar pits" or "The big Rio Grande river".

            Merriam Webster [merriam-webster.com]: "Even though hoi itself means "the", in English we almost always say "the hoi polloi". Or Oxford Dictionaries [oxforddictionaries.com]: "This knowledge has led some traditionalists to insist that hoi polloi should not be used in English with the, since that would be to state the word the twice. Such arguments miss the point: once established in English, expressions such as hoi polloi are treated as a fixed unit and are subject to the rules and conventions of English." Or even the venerable OED [oed.com] itself: "In English

            • by arth1 ( 260657 )

              It's interesting that you saw a paragraph about intellectual elites finding things by which they can look down upon others, and your response is to post something that makes you appear intellectual and discriminating, but has no basis in reality.

              That "the hoi polloi" is like "the La Brea" is based in reality, and not discriminating. Whatever else you extrapolated from that is on you.

          • "The hoi polloi" is like saying "the La Brea tar pits" or "The big Rio Grande river".

            IOW a high-brow version of stuttering?

          • by Maritz ( 1829006 )

            It quickly became a way to separate those with typographical sophistication from the hoi polloi.

            "The hoi polloi" is like saying "the La Brea tar pits" or "The big Rio Grande river".

            Thanks for the heads up, but I intend to discard this information so it doesn't start bothering me as well. That's pretty much the only usage of that that you see.

        • Typesetters and designers are pissed that we democratized the printed word, boo hoo. Now the unwashed masses can communicate ideas, and the bourgeoisie can whine incessantly about our ugly and inferior presentation.

        • 1) Heck, even today, with all the typography snobs running around, no one has really put together a good "so you know nothing about typography, but want to pick a font" guide -- well, except for the guides which are a one liner: "Use Helvetica."

          See the online book Butterick's practical typography [practicaltypography.com], in special sections Typography in ten minutes [practicaltypography.com] and system fonts [practicaltypography.com].

          It's free to read, but you can pay for it, and help it by talking about it.

      • by sudon't ( 580652 )

        I don't know why everyone hates comic sans...

        It’s fine, as long as you use it in thought and speech bubbles.

    • You have my vote.
    • Make everything Comic Sans, problem solved!

      I prefer Verdana for Email and documentation.

      I do have a pet peeve with Courier and Courier New. It should have been designed with a slashed zero so that it doesn't look like a capital O and the number one to be more distinctive from a lower-case L. Consolas provides some of this but I find it to be a bit too heavy. When doing CLI documentation it makes a big difference.

  • Deeper Subject (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Monday May 22, 2017 @03:05PM (#54465287) Journal
    I thought the article was going to be about how a capital "I" and a lowercase "L" look the same in some fonts and really messes up your code. I've had it happen before... Il
  • There is nothing overblown or dramatized about this article, nothing at all. I mean it's vaguely interesting but seems to miss the forest for the trees and blathering about colonialism isn't doing it any favors either.
    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday May 22, 2017 @03:53PM (#54465661)

      There was a recent article [economist.com] in the Economist about publishing in the Arab World. With the turmoil in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, Arabic publishing is dying. In Beirut bookstores, 40% of the books are in English, 40% in French, and only 20% in Arabic. Part of this is because Arabic is designed to be written by hand, and not printed. The shape of individual "letters" depends on the preceding and following "letters", much like English cursive, except even worse.

  • by thegreatbob ( 693104 ) on Monday May 22, 2017 @03:10PM (#54465343) Journal
    Force OCR-A on everyone now; this'll make it easier for our new robotic overlords to interpret our welcomings...
  • by Frosty Piss ( 770223 ) * on Monday May 22, 2017 @03:15PM (#54465375)

    ... Font Nazi...

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      If you bothered to read TFA you would see that the author makes a valid, if slightly obvious point. Certain fonts have become associated with certain ideas. Blackletter is associated with Nazism and the alt-right, because Nazis make extensive use of it as a kind of shorthand. Rather than put an actual swastika on the front of your magazine or web site, which might well get it booted or make it not safe to read in public, just use that font. If anyone questions it, berate them for claiming that a font is a h

  • by cyberchondriac ( 456626 ) on Monday May 22, 2017 @03:18PM (#54465411) Journal

    This article is just trashy, nothing to see here. So, everything with an old English/German font means "Nazi" now, does it? It couldn't possibly just reflect medieval culture, or Frankenstein, or Dracula, or harken back to any number of other things more mundane in the past several hundred years. Nope, it's Hitler. I guess, if you're really that shallow.
    But nothing is more telling of the actual SJ undercurrent and intent of this article than these last few paragraphs, strangely comparing Clinton's and Trump's campaign logos:

    Hillary Clinton ran for president with a slick logo befitting a Fortune 100 company. It had detractors, but I think we’ll remember it fondly as a symbol of what could have been—clarity, professionalism, and restraint.

    Donald Trump countered with a garish baseball cap that looked like it had been designed in a Google Doc by the man himself. This proved to be an effective way of selling Trump’s unique brand.

    I guess even fonts offend these people now. They're losing their minds.

    • #MFGA

    • by Scarred Intellect ( 1648867 ) on Monday May 22, 2017 @03:58PM (#54465693) Homepage Journal
      I particularly liked

      We take it for granted that we can type any word with a keyboard, but really, you should check your anglophone privilege.

      Never mind the inconsistent voice and poor writing overall...

      • by AthanasiusKircher ( 1333179 ) on Monday May 22, 2017 @05:51PM (#54466517)

        And never mind it's mostly not even about fonts, but rather different language scripts. The vast majority of the article compares German blackletter (not so much English blackletter), Arabic, Cyrillic, Croatian, etc.

        Yes, Arabic looks quite different from Germanic Fraktur and Russian Cyrillic. And...??

        Different fonts (a.k.a. "typefaces" for the older crowd) are about things like x-height and whether you use serifs and proportional vs. monospace and descenders/ascenders and use of text vs. display weights. TFA doesn't seem concerned with most of that at all, instead focusing on completely different letterforms in different languages, which isn't really a font issue as much as a linguistic one. The only real typeface issues that are brought up at the end of the article contrast the bizarre abstract Hillary logo with the simple script used for "Make America Great Again!" for Trump hats. Except again -- that's really not much of a "font" issue (though yes, a font was chosen for each) as a complex typographical design difference. One is creating a weird logo vaguely based on a letterform; the other is an actual sentence that needs to be typeset in a recognizable script.

        Broadly speaking, the article is somewhat about typography. But it isn't really about fonts, so I'm not sure what they're in the title at all.

      • The issue can be framed differently: I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can't Write My Name [modelviewculture.com]

    • Which is ironic because that the "nazi" blackletter font predates nazis by several centuries and used to be the standard German font before Hitler made a law that all official correspondence had to be written in standard Latin script, not blackletter.

  • by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Monday May 22, 2017 @03:20PM (#54465423) Journal
    I have a 'wooden eye', you can have five different fonts on a page and I wont notice it, unless it is wingdings...
    • I have a 'wooden eye', you can have five different fonts on a page and I wont notice it, unless it is wingdings...

      Five? I pity you.

      Or hey, maybe you're lucky, because bad typography seems to be the rule these days.

  • Hack (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    My favorite font: Hack [github.com]

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22, 2017 @03:33PM (#54465539)

    I thought the world was moving to the use of emojis for all communication.

  • by Sir Holo ( 531007 ) on Monday May 22, 2017 @03:37PM (#54465565)

    Anyone who has read any historical Nazi-era documents will tell you that Fraktur, the Nazi's favorite Blackletter (gothic) typeface, is headache-inducing. Fraktur is ugly. All of those embellishments make it a struggle to differentiate between letters – kind of the opposite of what written text is supposed to do.

    Oh, and Arial is a terrible font.

    • by lgw ( 121541 )

      Arial was great for low-dpi monitors back in the day. It also looked OK on a very low DPI printer. Helvetica needs the ability of the display/page to express some subtlety to come into its own.

  • It's not always the font - it's frequently the historical baggage that goes with it, as demonstrated by his early examples of typography associated with Nazi Germany.

    Sometimes it is the font. "Sharp, pointy" fonts like some of the Nazi-era examples he used may convey sharpness, strong boundaries, or even authority in many readers. A simple font that looks like a child's less-than-perfect crayon manuscript will likely remind people of children and all of the emotions that come with that.

    It's not just fonts

  • It was interesting to learn about the existence of Mirsaal and Balkan Sans, but I'd rather have read about them in an article titled "Two attempts by font designers to help bridge cultural division." However, in both cases, I think there's more that the article didn't mention. The article talks about the difficulty of typing in Arabic, but when I think about computers and representing Arabic, I think of the kind of automatic transliteration that, for example, the Katib text editor [katibapp.com] does. It says Mirsaal look
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Chiropractors think all your ails are due to spinal problems, journalists think everyone uses Apple products, and graphic designers think which font used is very important.

  • by Drunkulus ( 920976 ) on Monday May 22, 2017 @04:59PM (#54466175)
    Honestly, in a time when UI "designers" insist that text be just a shade or two grayer than a light gray background, you're lucky to make it out at all.
    • by Megane ( 129182 )

      This is what I call the "85-85" problem. For some reason, in the early 2Ks or so, it became a meme for blogs to display body text as 85% size 85% gray, and often on a non-white background. When I pick the text size in my web browser, that's because that's the size I want to read it at, not 85% of it. Contrast also matters for readability, and I don't want to read gray-on-gray text.

      Even worse is when someone wants to be edgy with inverse text. I want my background lighter than the text because when reading

  • Using AdBlock I (try to) block all the fonts (*.woff) — except "awesome" and similar "fonts", which are, in fact, icons... The browser falls back to some local substitute or another, which is just fine with me — and makes the world a slightly better place by reducing the network traffic and memory usage on my desktop.

    Maybe, more people should do the same — thus hinting to the webmasters to concentrate on content more than the presentation...

    • by Megane ( 129182 )
      I have "Allow documents to use other fonts" unchecked and read everything using Lucida Gothic. One big reason for this is I hate reading small point size serif fonts on the screen. This subverts the few web sites like Gawker that use custom fonts for UI icons, but fuck them. Everybody else gets along just fine without using custom icon fonts.
  • http://www.hometown-pages.com/... [hometown-pages.com]

    Brick Heck, the youngest child on ABC’s “The Middle,” isn’t someone most kids would want to emulate. He’s socially inept, has several odd behavioral traits and makes the library his favorite destination.

    Since I’m far removed from childhood — gaining a little wisdom along the way — and past the social anxiety of trying to fit in, I’m rooting for him. I realize he is just a fictional character, but popular culture does infl

  • Is this article perhaps an accidental repost from 1986? Doomers have been writing this sort of nonsense article for decades.

  • "The next generation of fascists will not love geometric sans serifs as much as Mussolini did. They won’t be threatening journalists in blackletter."

    No, they'll be telling us all what fonts to use lest we be considered racist.
  • When I grew up, I associated Fraktur with old books, with no fuhr.. I mean further value connotations. For instance, my grandma has an ancient bible printed in Fraktur. It is only in the past few years that I have started seeing Fraktur in the Nazi light in the general media and entertainment. Likewise, terms such as "grammar nazi" are relatively recent. I have been called a "nazi" because I like to keep things in order. I'm not even going to start on the millennia-long history of the swastika. I guess font
  • "As Hersh writes, 'Typography can silently influence: It can signify dangerous ideas, normalize dictatorships, and sever broken nations. In some cases it may be a matter of life and death. And it can do this as powerfully as the words it depicts.' Don't believe him? He's got ample visual examples to prove it."

    His ample visual samples are blackletter, Arabic, and Cyrillic, and 2 of those aren't fonts, they're alphabets. And Hillary's logo vs. Donald's hat. I know people who spend hours agonizing over
  • I always use Tahoma on my computers.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    You see a lot of Blackletter neo-Gothic ... in Gang Tattoos. Most people associate the Blackletter fonts (though they don't know the name) with Latino Gangs like MS-13, Mexican Mafia, and the like from the pictures of tattooed criminal defendants in the media or the various gang members it is simply impossible not to meet in daily life in Southern California with heavy, heavy Blackletter tats.

    Indeed Blackletter tats like the ones pictured here:'

    http://latinoprisongangs.blogspot.com/2010/04/mexicanhispanic-g

  • Why don’t we use blackletter anymore? The answer is literally “Hitler.” Nazi leadership used the Fraktur, an archetypal variety of blackletter, as their official typeface.

    or

    The Nazis played a part in this. In 1941, the regime re-characterized Fraktur as Judenletter, “Jewish letters,” and systematically banned it from use.

    So the Nazis banned their official typeface? No wonder they lost the war....

    If you haven't read the TFA: These two statements aren't even a paragraph apart!

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