Font scourges and other design nightmares

There's something magical about fonts. I think of them as a form of nonverbal communication. You can communicate buckets of information with the font that you choose, so you must always choose carefully.

Choosing a font for papers in college was easy - I always went with the font that made my paper the length that was required. Rarely did I have to resort to Courier New, the best friend of the non-verbose among us. But back then, I didn't know anything about serif or sans serif fonts and in hindsight, probably made some bad choices for my papers (or maybe that's just how I'm explaining away those sub-A grades).

My design books in college taught me the difference between and usage of serif and sans serif fonts. Serif fonts have "feet," which help your eye connect the letters on the page. According to my design books, serif fonts are best for printed materials, but not necessarily headings.

For headings, turn to a solid sans serif font and even bold it if you want, and you won't be disappointed. Also pull out a sans serif font for online materials--text on a screen is apparently more easily read when it doesn't have "feet" (less screen clutter?).

For our wedding invitations, I wasn't content with choosing among the standard Windows fonts. Instead, I scoured online font sites and downloaded a handful that suited us and our wedding. I printed test copies of our invitations and we hosted a little eliminations ceremony until we decided upon the perfect font for our day. A little OCD, perhaps, but I wanted our invitations to be unique.

You can imagine my delight--since I am a bit of a font nerd--when B sent me a periodic table of typefaces. The table ranks fonts according to popularity, and what a great resource it is for anyone contemplating any kind of visual data design. This information is gold for anyone in the design community.

I sent the table to my coworkers, and LS brought up an excellent point--Arial was missing from the table. Arial is a go-to sans serif font for many a writer (or so I thought), so I assumed it was simply a matter of a technicality.

I dug deep and thought that I recalled that Arial and Helvetica (note its important placement as the numero uno font) were actually the same font, and Arial was its Windows name and Helvetica was its Macintosh name. However, my minimal Mac usage during my formative years wasn't enough to help me with this problem, so I turned to Google, which did not disappoint.

I found this article, which you needn't read in its entirety--the beginning and end summarize nicely. Pay particular attention to the last sentence, which I shall quote here for those who are not interested in learning about font heritage:

"I can almost hear young designers now saying, 'Helvetica? That’s that font that looks kinda like Arial, right?'"

As it turns out, Arial is the imposter, and Helvetica is the real deal! And sadly, the writer's nightmare has come true--while I am technically not a designer, I work with fonts and never learned about Arial's murky past and its status as a sub-par font. However, now that I have my new table, he or she can fear not--I shall do my best to choose a better font in the future.