Font-explosion at the Hillcrest Farmer's Market

In my day job, I am surrounded by fonts. There are the fonts we use at work: a sans serif (Helvetica) and a serif font (Times New Roman). Pretty boring, but it does the job for what I do which is present information.

Then there are the fonts I use in ads. It runs the gamut of Arial to, ohmygawd, Hobo. Yikes. Whatever the client wants. Who I am to tell them that using Rickshaw touting something even slightly Asian is unspeakably horrible? But then there are the fonts I truly despise. Comic Sans is at the top of my list and that sentiment is growing online as well.

I can go on about why I hate Comic Sans: the lack of elegance in its lines, no thought about the negative space and the mere fact that it has comic in its name when I don't find anything comedic about it at all. But some people apparently do.


Click on image for headache inducing font usage.

Enter Hillcrest Farmers Market (or any farmers market for that matter). Besides a bounty of fresh foods, it is a bounty of fonts. Olde English, Papyrus, Lithos and even Comic Sans. Just looking at the signs is enough to give me a headache, especially when it involves gradients and morphing the letters. They certainly are eye catching but in a bad way.

It seems that Papyrus is the default font for anything organic, natural and healthy. It's become so overused that many people in the design field think Papyrus is right up there with Comic Sans in the fonts-to-avoid column. It makes you wonder what those people think when they combine Comic Sans and Papyrus. What message are they saying using those fonts? Is it funny but wholesome and natural?



As for me, my favorite font is Futura. I save it for all my favorite projects at work. Or maybe because it is the featured font in all those Wes Anderson films.