Die Comic Sans Die: The Typography Thread

If you?re reading something, and it?s not written by hand or plane, it?s probably a typeface (commonly known as a font). Typography is an underappreciated, but essential part of communication ? especially in the digital age when anyone can choose from a large variety of fonts or even create their own. This thread is for questions, tips, and general discussion of the field of typography.

So we?re all on about the same page, here?s a few basic terms to know about typography.

Typeface: This is a set of characters (letters, numbers, symbols) that all go together.

Font: This is the file a computer uses to apply a typeface to something.

Serif: This can be a noun describing the little feet on some characters (seen below) or an adjective for type which utilizes serifs.

[image=http://blog.bottleyourbrand.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/6/files/general-blog-images/serif-font.jpg]

Sans Serif: Often shortened to ?Sans? in font names, this just means that a typeface doesn?t have the aforementioned lines. See below again.

[image=http://ilovetypography.com/img/national-klim.gif]

Legibility: The quality of a typeface that allows it to be easily understood. Some type is purposefully not legible, but you should be very careful using it.

Readability: This describes how easy text is to read. Legibility is one part of this, along with spacing, line-length, and positioning of text on the page (or screen)

Comic Sans: [image=http://i177.photobucket.com/albums/w209/Trick_arrow/achewood_comicsans_censored.gif]

 

Papyrus.

 

Typography is very important in web design, IMO.

 

On the opposite end of font bashing ... I find Calibri to be a very, very good font for Microsoft Word and really great for anything now. Love the new addition in 2007.

 

Calibri's not bad... but I still tend to stick with Times New Roman most of the time. Not that I do web designing

 

My favourites have to be Garamond and Helvetica.

 

Amongst my favourites arein no particular order)
Calibri
Myriad Pro
Trebuchet MS
Aeroportal
Aller Sans
Quicksand
Advent.


and for future reference; the comic you showed there did NOT have comic sans.

 

Calibri is great. I personally hope that it becomes an accepted standard along with Times New Roman.

 

Times New Roman (bolded) is my favorite "regular" font style. Chiller and Tubular are hilarious.

 

http://www.xkcd.com/590/

I generally use Helvetica or Veranda for my web stuff. I think my resume is done in Palatino, and my only beef with that font is that it runs large.

In general, if there's a default font I use something else on principal.

 

What's wrong with Papyrus? I've always liked that font, and I use it in my fan fiction e-Books for special titles.

 

It's an ugly font. It tries to look 'handwritten' but it just looks mechanical. You also can't use it very well in a design. Really, it just won't turn out that well.

As for my favorite fonts, I like: walkway, eurostile, serifsy, and alpha mack.


Alpha Mack is an exception for me, really, as I tend to stay away from script fonts because they look too fake. But I've had awesome results with it.

[image=http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/696/shadowsposterbyfidoalmi.jpg]

An example of how I used serifsy.

[image=http://img253.imageshack.us/img253/64/acommonspreadbyfidoalmi.jpg]

And Alpha Mack in use.

Lately, though, I've gotten into taking a boring font like helvetica and distorting it through the use of brushes.

 

I seldom use Papyrus. It's really hard for me to make it look decent. Usually a more subtle font does the trick.


I do video editing and when I make titles, my directors generally want a specific font that they found on the computer they were working on. Bouncing the same project between Mac and PC computers it is a bit frustrating not have that font available sometimes. I had not realized how expensive it is to buy fonts!

Courier is standard for screenplays. I see it and I just automatically think "film industry".

I also read a lot of fanfiction and ff.net uses Lucida Grande. I don't like to read fanfiction in any other font any more.



I love the Star Wars (and Harry Potter) fonts out there! They are so fun to use, but I rarely get the opportunity.

 

Helvetica always works.

 

I've actually been involved with a small class on typography in titles this year. One really cool part of it was looking at Kinetic Typography examples -- has anybody heard of it before?

If you search on youtube for it, you'll find plenty of examples.

Most are done to movie quotes. This is a great example of Kinetic Typography. What do you think?

 

Funny. I always rather liked to use Papyrus and Comic Sans on occasion.

I guess when it comes to font usage, I'm just not your type.

 

Since it's pretty quiet ... just so you know my friend, I did laugh at that. And then groan.

 

Right now I keep the following fonts...

911 Porscha Italics
Beckett
Bnkgothm
Episode1
Jedi Solid
LCD 2B/2L/2N/2U
LCD Bold
LCD L/N/U
Por2
RingM
RuneEng2
Starjedi
Starjhol

 

Serpentine is a nice, block letter style font. Other than that, for web design I like Arial and Helvetica for Sans Serif, and Georgia for Serif.

 

Even though it's pretty common, I like the Arial font family since it's so clean and crisp--great for design.

 

I really like Andy for a fun font.

 

There's a quiz on Ironic Sans for anybody who wants to find out if they can tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica.


(If you have trouble, or just enjoy cheating, here's a guide to some easy differences to go by.)

 

Nice job!