Unless someone is working on an essay, it is easy to forget about fonts. Most sites just default to a single font, such as Arial or Times New Roman. Despite this forgetfulness, they are of insurmountable importance to how people communicate, post and pre-Internet.
From Video Game Fonts to Professional Fonts, and much more, fonts are very versatile. Anyone can create a font, as by dictionary definition, a font is an assortment or set of characters all of one style and sometimes one size.
The first font, or typeface as it’s called professionally, is the Blackletter typeface; also known as Gothic script. According to the British Library, this font was invented sometime within the 14/15th century in Western Europe, and is still commonly used up until about the 20th century. The Germans were among the last to commonly use it over other fonts.
The use of fonts was heavily linked with the invention of the press print, the printer’s purpose was made to make the mass production of books easier. Fonts and printing presses are linked because both are related to the other’s creation. The press uses a block of either wood or metal that has the text needed on it that is then covered in ink and pressed onto a stack of papers on both the top and bottom.
If that was too long of an explanation, in the simplest of terms, it’s basically a giant stamp that puts words onto large amounts of paper.
One would assume that with over 200,000 different fonts, people would have a unique favorite font, as there are so many to pick from, but this doesn’t seem to be the case, at least when looking at these four students.
“I like the original Arial and maybe cursive on special writing things,” freshman Jordan Castaneda said. “You know, I don’t like those fonts that are just really big and weird looking.”
For others, default fonts can be boring or unappealing.
“My favorite one is Comic Sans,” freshman Kiara Portrey said. “I don’t like the generic font[Arial].”
Fonts like Comic Sans draw strong opinions from people, including from sophomore Mo Carlson. “[My favorite font is] Times New Roman,” Carlson said. “[My least favorite font is] Comic Sans.”
Sophomore Mari Smith agrees with Carlson about Times New Roman, but said, “[My least favorite font is] Arial.”
While all picking different fonts when it comes to the ones they like and dislike, they all mostly mention the same fonts, and the freshmen when asked said they didn’t even know the names of the more common fonts. Despite their importance to the internet and communication in general, fonts are an overlooked art. There is so much creativity and fun involved in fonts. Some are funny, some are cool, and others are professional.
The whole take away from this is, find some cool fonts. There are many interesting and cool fonts out there to use, or if you somehow find all of them boring, make one of your own!
