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Right now you are reading one of the Guardian’s fancy fonts from our in-house typeface family. It’s possible you don’t care about this; but I very much do. (The difference between a font and a typeface is that a font is a specific iteration of a typeface. Bold, italic, size, etc, though I’m not a stickler for this, so I’ll just use “font” here.)
Fonts are a huge part of our lives, because words and numbers are. Even if you think you don’t have a favourite font, I can assure you that you absolutely do. Even if you think there is no font that would cause you to cross a road or avoid eye contact on the bus, there is. We are wedded to fonts; they work their way into our hearts and minds by either stealth or, of course, design.
A few years ago Helvetica became so omnipresent that it was the subject of longform essays, an exhibition at MoMA and a hit documentary. American Airlines, Toyota and Nestlé all use versions of it. Somewhat traumatically, it has also been used by the UK government. That may well have been the final nail in the coffin, as Helvetica became victim to tall poppy syndrome. Does anybody associate Chris Grayling and Matt Hancock with cool? No.
On the corporate side of things, fonts inspire brand loyalty. You’ll notice that sometimes when companies change fonts, consumers revolt. Often the companies just give up and change back. Gap once attempted to switch from its established serif font to Helvetica on a drop-shadowed square, and it just ended up looking like the header for a school-project Word document. It reverted. Tropicana also backtracked.
Bibliophiles, and I am one, take a keen interest in cover designs, but also fonts used. Have you ever read a book and found the lettering infuriatingly dense, making it hard to follow? Or one whose showiness is distracting? Have you ever been browsing spines on a bookshop shelf and had one jump out at you amid a crowded section?
Fonts have different personalities, which is why you never see Comic Sans on a funeral notice. Or a railway arch graffitied in Times New Roman. Authoritarian regimes tend not to stylise in a font called High Jinkies. I will never not find it amusing that I can write something in Arial, hate it to my very core; then switch the font to EB Garamond and think: this is a masterpiece. A perfect example, I’m sure you’ll agree, of the transformative power of fonts.
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