Typography Terror: Handwriting Fonts
Date: May 18, 2023
I recently received a card for someone who does a service which I need. It had the email address in a cursive (handwriting) font. This was difficult to read.... The rest of the card ALSO had a handwriting font - a DIFFERENT one, not even in the same 'font family.' Palm to forehead moment.
Example of horrendous font usage
In early years, (loosely referring to the dawn of the MACINTOSH computer), an introduction of some very decorative fonts arrived on the scene. The tendency was to overuse them. The result was often hard to read, or just plain distracting!
Decorative fonts have their place. A logo. Maybe a themed piece with some elements in a certain, decorative font. BUT NOT EVERYTHING. It sort of goes along the analogy of wearing stripes and plaid together; it's an optical nightmare. I learned long ago that if you are mixing fonts at all, stick to a sans-serif for headings, and a serif font for paragraphs.
There is a certain local (printed) newspaper in my area - wonderful source of information, but font abuse runs rampant. What's frightening is that the person behind the look and feel of it went to school for this. It always amazes me at how many different fonts appear on a given page; the page might sport several articles, and almost every single one has decorative fonts in the headings, and a totally different font for the body. If the 'body font' was uniform for all of the articles, it might look better. But, this is not the case.
Other online (web) abuses include using colored text to the point where web content begins to resemble a greeting card, or a circus. It's distracting, hard to read, and defeats the purpose of the content, in most cases. When I taught basic web development many years ago, I stressed, "Don't do something just because you can."
Fonts in general - described in the article linked below "Fonts are like celebrities—some are famous, while others can be downright infamous." Here is an amusing article I found about fonts...