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I'm a font snob


caitlinsmom
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I've known this for quite sometime but it became very apparent today when I found myself instantly discrediting any HS planner that had a bad font.  I don't even know if they would have been my dream planner, it doesn't matter with bad font present.

 

I am aware of how snobby and odd I sound right now. :)

 

Anyone else nit-pick fonts?

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We just did this at lunch after church!  How funny!  It was just three of us ooh-ing and aahhing about fonts we love and booing ones we hate.  

 

Haha.

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I've known this for quite sometime but it became very apparent today when I found myself instantly discrediting any HS planner that had a bad font.  I don't even know if they would have been my dream planner, it doesn't matter with bad font present.

 

I am aware of how snobby and odd I sound right now. :)

 

Anyone else nit-pick fonts?

 

Totally.

 

Also, I judge underlining, double-spaces after end punctuation, and making scroll-y fonts bold/italicized.

 

I'm in a diocesan choir (choirs made up of people from different parishes, singing together for just a few special events). The director makes up a nice booklet for us for each event, including a table of contents. There were some changes for this last event so she e-mailed PDF files of a couple of different pieces of music, and a Word document of the TOC. Joy! Because I could redo it to get rid of the underlines, format space after the paragraphs instead of double spaces/hard returns, change the font on the header and the body text, and use dotted leaders instead of the multiple periods all the way across the page,

 

Desktop publisher. Yup, that's me. :D

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I haven't read any of the responses.  I hear quite a few people griping about fonts lately.  It's like hip or something.  Especially comic sans.  I really don't care about font choice at all unless I can't read them.  And I have done online web design, so I have spent hours looking at various fonts. 

 

ETA -  I did read the responses now.  LOL on Comic Sans.  Seriously, if a curriculum is well written and edited, do not care about font.   I don't even care about cursive fonts either.  I have never seen an adult's handwriting that looked like any version of cursive text commonly taught.  Everyone develops their own handwriting and cursive style over time. 

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I am with you all. I love fonts, and I am very picky about line spacing, letter spacing, and line breaks that make sense.

 

...although I am also an English snob and do not mind correctly-hyphenated words in body text (not in headers or anything, of course). :D

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Two words...

 

Comic Sans

 

I can't bear it.

 

Say it ain't so!

 

I once posted a list on my blog of all the homeschool curricula in comic sans. So, yes. Another font judge.

 

You, too?

 

I remember reading some design advice that called Comic Sans (and a number of others, including Papyrus, Gigi, Zapfino, and Vivaldi)  "the Mom Jeans of fonts."

The Mom Jeans of Fonts? :svengo:

 

 

:ohmy:

 

As soon as I'm done here, I'm changing my e-mail font. Mom Jeans? And from the article: Juvenile? Shallow? Empty-headed? Is THAT what I have been 'telling' people about me? Ack!!

 

May we also address on this thread the disappearance of the double space after the end of a sentence?  Breaks my heart.  I correct it whenever possible.  

 

I thought the double space was eliminated because with word processing the double spacing led to strange white lines all through pages. I must say, though, it was a hard habit for me to break! I liked the double spacing, but I do see the strange lines snaking through essays, etc, when they are used.

 

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The double space thing is something I do and I would like to break myself since it's an older thing. I know it's not the norm anymore, but I learned back in the days when it was pretty standard.

 

When I was teaching, it was all I could do to get a surprising number of kids to put a space after the period.All their sentences ran together.Like I'm showing you here.And it was really weird and annoying.Like, who would do that!?!

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May we also address on this thread the disappearance of the double space after the end of a sentence?  Breaks my heart.  I correct it whenever possible.  

 

And I'd have to re-correct it. No double spaces after end punctuation. It's the law. ::snerk::  No, really, with today's kerned typesetting, double spaces after periods adds white space all through the text that is unsightly, especially if the document is formatted with columns and hyphenation is turned off. Oh, my poor eyeballs!

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The double space thing is something I do and I would like to break myself since it's an older thing. I know it's not the norm anymore, but I learned back in the days when it was pretty standard.

 

 

 

Two years of typing, back in the day when we had manual typewriters and the keys were blank so that we had to learn to touch-type, plus two years of shorthand, so you bet I was trained to double-space. :-) But it's the first thing I learned to toss out the window when I began working with page-layout programs (the second was underlining).

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...although I am also an English snob and do not mind correctly-hyphenated words in body text (not in headers or anything, of course). :D

It's headings I'm thinking of

 

Introduction to the Spalding

Method

 

Rather than

 

Introduction to

the Spalding Method

 

Which breaks up words that should stay together.

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I do digital scrapbooking, so I am choosy about the fonts I use for it.  I didn't realize how much so until my kids started pointing out tacky looking billboards, bus benches, etc because they thought they could have used a better choice of font. :) 

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I do digital scrapbooking, so I am choosy about the fonts I use for it.  I didn't realize how much so until my kids started pointing out tacky looking billboards, bus benches, etc because they thought they could have used a better choice of font. :)

 

:cheers2:

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I'm ashamed at how judgmental I am in regards to comic sans. I recently told my DH that while I liked our kids' piano teacher "she does use comic sans, so..."

 

A friend once worked as an assistant in an advertising agency, back in the late 90s. His job was to look through font books to find specific fonts - so, for example, his employer would find a font in another ad or copy that he liked, and my friend had to figure out what that font was by comparing it to hundreds of choices. I'm sure the Internet has rendered this job obsolete, but it just shows how important a good font is.

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I'm ashamed at how judgmental I am in regards to comic sans. I recently told my DH that while I liked our kids' piano teacher "she does use comic sans, so..."

 

A friend once worked as an assistant in an advertising agency, back in the late 90s. His job was to look through font books to find specific fonts - so, for example, his employer would find a font in another ad or copy that he liked, and my friend had to figure out what that font was by comparing it to hundreds of choices. I'm sure the Internet has rendered this job obsolete, but it just shows how important a good font is.

 

I am not going to admit what I think when I receive a resume from a job-seeker that is all in Comic Sans. You will think I am a horrid person.  :leaving:

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But really, why Comic Sans? Is it the most hated because everyone knows the name of that font and actually recognizes it? I would bet the majority of people couldn't even name 10 fonts without looking. I am not a fan of Comic Sans either, but I do think it's kind of weird how cool it has become to hate it.

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I have to admit, the fact that Mr. Q Science is in comic sans has really turned me off...

 

I've come to realize that I can't take sloppy looking curriculum seriously. How something looks affects whether I think it is well done and worth my time or whether it'll sit on the shelf, making me feel guilty. I guess I'm visual like that. 

 

Emily

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Yes, from educated people no less. Astonishing.

 

Do they also underline text? And do bold italics? (which is doubly worse on Comic Sans since it does not have bold or italic faces) Because I'm already sharing your thoughts.... :leaving:

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Do you font people know why sometimes in Word there will be odd spaces between one letter and the next?  You don't add a space there, but for some reason there seems to be a little bit of extra space randomly.  I HATE THAT.

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But really, why Comic Sans? Is it the most hated because everyone knows the name of that font and actually recognizes it? I would bet the majority of people couldn't even name 10 fonts without looking. I am not a fan of Comic Sans either, but I do think it's kind of weird how cool it has become to hate it.

It has become quite an odd little fad. My teenager is even on board. It's the white Zinfandel of the moment.

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Do you font people know why sometimes in Word there will be odd spaces between one letter and the next?  You don't add a space there, but for some reason there seems to be a little bit of extra space randomly.  I HATE THAT.

 

Here's the techie answer:

 

When you type using an actual typewriter, each letter and space is a fixed space; each letter is exactly the same size, whether it's a capital W or a lower-case i. It is why double spaces are recommended after end punctuation, so that your eye can *see* where sentences end and begin.

 

When you are using a computer, however, this is not so. Letters and spaces are kerned; that is, they take up a different amount of space. and that includes spaces made using your space bar. Software will adjust how much space is between words to make them fit on a line. It is why double spaces after end punctuation are unsightly. It's especially true if, for example, you're doing a cute newsletter that has columns and you have justified the right margin and turned off (or didn't turn on in the first place) hyphenation. The software will stretch the space between words on each line to fill the space before going down to the next line.

 

There is such a thing as em and en spaces, but I don't want to bore you with more details, lol. Suffice to say that your text will look better if you turn on hyphenation and don't justify the right margin. :-)

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