Fonts

This is kinda not exactly television-related. BUT, let me stress that I love looking at the logos of show titles, since they're often done in a special font, or at least in a steady color scheme. Simpsons and Brady Bunch come to mind for starters. Plus, Frasier had a different colored title every season, which is how to tell them apart really quickly in reruns. But let's look at a list of fonts today...

I am kinda a font freak. In the late nineties I would scour the 'net for the most accurate font to express my personality. Then I'd have my closest friends get it too, so they could read it in AIM (well, technically AOL IM back then, LoL). In college, I couldn't stand the look of the standard, Times New Roman font that I had been required to use on science fair projects (which was pretty much the only thing we had to type in high school, aside from Extended Essays and World Lit papers). So I used Arial. For everything. It's generally accepted by professors, although I did have a classmate in graduate school question my choice.

Honestly, serifs bother me. Those are the little tags on the tops and bottoms of letters in a TNR-esque font. And I hate them. I think they're annoying and ugly. Verdana is my font of choice in a non-professional setting, although I do use comic sans in IMs. (and yes, most of my blogs have serifs because I have been using the default forever, LoL.)

Anyway, the "periodic table of fonts" has recently been brought to my attention several times, and I decided to make some comments about it. At first I was appalled at the focus on popularity as opposed to order. But, the author of the short article does mention that he tried, but it really wouldn't suit his purpose.

Now, let's review his ordering (which was based on several lists)...
#1 is Helvetica. um, what?
#6 is Garamond. If I have to use a serif, I try to get away with this one. ;)
#7 is Times. ::eye roll::
#12 is Lucida. ridiculously useless font.
#17 is some awful thing called Trinite. way too much serif.
#18 is Syntax. Remember that awful font? from back when you still had a printer that spit out accordion paper?
#26 is Thesis. no lie. and it's only been around since 1994. how much do you want to bet someone found a way to create a font that takes up slightly more space per line without anyone noticing... resulting in a few extra pages over the course of three chapters... I'll have to look into this...
#29 is Clarendon. It's a nice font in general, but it's difficult to find the right occasion to use it.
#33 is the oldest font in the book. Gutenberg B-42. it looks just how you'd imagine it might.
#50 is Century. fairly common, but still ehhhh.
#63 is Courier. Yes, it's butt-ugly, but how did it end up so low on the list??
#96 is the newest font of the bunch... 2002's Neutraface, a sans-serif. Tied with #71 Prokyon, another sans-serif. AND #62 - Fedra, another winner (aka sans-serif).