I love fonts.
When my daughter was a freshman, I took her with me to Parent Teacher conferences. Her geography teacher showed me a paper she'd written for his class. Then he turned to her and asked a bizarre question. "What made you choose this font?"
I hurriedly looked
at the paper, but it wasn't written in Script
MT Bold or in chick. In
fact, it wasn't even written in Comic Sans. Oh no. It was written in the very respectable Courier New.
Wasn't everyone's? This was an honor's class after all.
So she told him that
Courier New was the font most frequently requested by agents and editors
because it was so easy on their eyes, and that she and I had possibly gotten a
little snobby about always using it.
He thought that was
very interesting, and said he loved to hear stories about why people chose fonts.
I'd never thought about it before. By that point I had gotten so used to
Courier New that I changed every document I opened to Courier New before I read
it. (Quick note: after writing with Sabrina so much, I can now handle Arial as
well.)
The default font on
my computer is Times New Roman and
if I start typing in it, my mind will go completely blank. Sometimes it takes
me a minute or two to figure out what is wrong, and then I switch to Courier
New and everything is good again.
I once watched a
whole documentary about the Helvetica Font*, and sometimes can be reduced to
tears by the stupidity of blogger's font interface.
Even if you're not a
font snob like me, you'll enjoy this video:
By the way:
*This is actually Arial again, because they are very similar. Helvetica fans, please forgive me.
