nasty habits…

Partially out of amazement, and partially out of pure agreement, and even yet, also for hilarity, I had to post this. It’s long, but well worth the read for anyone with even the slightest interest in typography, design, and a good belly-laugh. Written by Helen Razor (years before now, a crazy radio dj favourite on JJJ – wasn’t she on breakfast with Mikey Robins for years?) I found this article as the last-page “Rearview” within the June Edition of “Desktop” (Issue #194) for those interested in finding the original.

Type of Addiction
Helen Razor is trying to kick a nasty habit.

Typefaces really ought to be scheduled by fierce federal regulators, guarded jealously and only distributed in the most moderate fashion. Rather like pharmaceuticals, typefaces have the potential of good, as well as the power of absolute hazy evil. When used judiciously and prescribed by a qualified design practitioner, they can enhance and improve the health of the social body. A well-chosen font can be the antidote to all sorts of marketing and occasional ills. ‘Do you have a small business ailing with foot rot, Madam’; ‘Sir, a new product line with a terrible cold?’ The healing powers of a typeface might be the only thing to redeem you from a certain, slow commercial death. A sleek Gill-inspired string of text could be your saviour and the last line of medical defence between you and bereavement. Think of Garamond as a life-saving antibiotic – of Times New Roman as intravenous insulin. (Of Arial, of course, as smack, cut with Ajax. Readers of this column will likely recall previous tirades spewed in opposition to this smug, objectionable and needlessly spare little bugger. Appearing on needlessly costly and alleged ‘gourmet’ items the western world over, Arial, like heroin, empties one’s life of meaning and makes the pain of contemplation go away. I have not yet collected evidence to this end, but I feel sure that the lavish misuse of Arial will shortly result in the theft of DVD players.)

Fonts, upon closer inspection, have even more in common with drugs. Not only are they expensive and sometimes illegally traded online, they can prove wildly addictive to the untrained hobbyist. You know, you just start with a little Helvetica, and all of a sudden you’re using drop shadows, you’re inhaling geometric effects – at first in a purely experimental way – and then all of a sudden, you’re hocking the silverware in an effort to support your hard and relentless Dingbats habit. Friends don’t want to know you anymore because not only is your skin bad and your hygiene slipping, your conversation has reduced to a miniscule sliver where all you can say is ‘font font font’. Your relationship with Photoshop has moved into the co-dependent phase. You’re living on a diet of Nick Cave records, ice cream and shallow faith. Typographical self-medication is a dangerous and terrible thing.

In my own case, for example, typeface free-basing has become a frequent and ill-advised habit. Can you blame me? The sheer seductive might of a lustrous new font is hard to resist. For users such as I, unschooled in the complex and mystical doctrine of responsible font usage, temptation abounds. Come on, they’re just there for the taking! Sweet, succulent and putatively innocent little typefaces snug and available on their digital shelves. Screeching to the uninitiated, “Try me, I’m harmless.”

To the callow hobbyist, it starts simply. One day, you discover that you can send an email in Comic Sans. (NB: A designer friend of mine called Myles has a particular aversion to e-mails, or anything else, created using this self-righteous and affectedly cute typeface. It’s always annoyingly preppy personal assistants, he reckons, that are drawn to Comic Sans. It upsets him terribly and he regards the irresponsible over-use of Comic Sans as the keyboard equivalent of the kind of voluptuous hand writing that features little valentine shapes that appear above the lower case ‘i’. He has a salient point and I support him utterly in his unfettered irritation. Comic Sans, if we are to continue to employ the drug analogy, is kind of like GBH. It’s cheap and widely available. While its ability to shut down a major portion of your brain is initially appealing, it can result in comatose stupidity and occasional death. Don’t laugh. Comic Sans is pure typographical wickedness.)

So, in any case, it might start with the naive use of a cunning little font in correspondence. Then, the hobbyist will inevitably, discover the Windows default colour fuchsia. And then the hexadecimal wheel of experimentation (which, needless to impart, is the typographical equivalent of acid.) Moving a little to the right, left, up or down from an already waywardly offensive and unwholesome colour like fuchsia can only result in metabolic and psychological disaster.

The merest, most childlike desire to ‘jazz up’ an email is the commencement of the downfall. It can only get worse once the colour wheel is unleashed. The coy trial of one’s aesthetic abilities then takes a vicious turn.

There’s a nasty, enabling pusher man who makes this possible and he lives somewhere in America’s pacific north-west. He’s the world’s second richest man, he is a Harvard alumnus and his name, of course, is William H Gates. Sometimes he’s known as the chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation, those who have sampled his tatty and addictive wares know him as ‘the Connection’, ‘Spanish Bill’, or, simply, ‘my dealer’.

Gates is the man responsible not only for alleged anti-competitive behaviour, a noxious operating system monopoly and reintroducing cardigans, sandals and name-designer pocket protectors into the wardrobes of billionaires. Oh no. He is accountable for the substance which transforms amateur, functioning typographical addicts into full-blown bad design junkies. The crack rock of font abuse is a little talked-about evil known as Word Art.

If you have not encountered this contaminated smirch upon the face of otherwise sensible design, I beseech you, do not veer anywhere near Microsoft Word and do not select view>toolbars>word art. Do not be tempted to open the offensive pane of indignity, which is truly the Pandora’s Box of aesthetics. Within, you will only find the most abhorrent gradations of colour, the most futile waveforms and the kind of sadistic ugliness that was previously the sole domain of 18th century French nobility. Ugh.

That these painful options are readily available to visually incompetent persons such as myself is a moral outrage that dwarfs just about anything, including the availability of red food colouring to primary school children, that I can think of. Typefaces should only be given to responsible adults. The rest of us will have to content ourselves with an unglamorous font.