Someone pointed out Helvetica to me when I was about nineteen and ruined the entire built environment. It’s everywhere. Airport signs, government forms, the side of ambulances, the logo of your bank, the menu at the place you’ve been going to for years. I walk through cities now and I can’t stop reading the walls — not the words, the letterforms. The kerning. The weight. Something that used to be invisible is now the loudest thing in the room and I did not ask for this and I cannot give it back.
This happens with a lot of things but fonts are particularly brutal because there is no environment safe from them. Books, screens, packaging, tattoos, the side of a truck that cuts you off on the highway. Every surface that has ever had a human decision made about it has a font on it and now you see the decision every time. You see that someone chose this. You see whether they chose well.
The ones that bother me most are the ones that are almost right. Comic Sans gets a lot of grief and sure, fine, but at least it’s honest about what it is. The truly offensive fonts are the ones used by businesses that wanted to seem premium and picked something with thin strokes and wide spacing and called it a day. A slightly-off luxury font on a strip mall laser hair removal place. The gap between the aspiration and the execution sitting right there in the letterforms, visible to anyone who knows how to look, invisible to everyone else.
I’ve been told this makes me annoying at restaurants. I think that’s fair. There’s something insufferable about caring about a thing most people have correctly decided not to care about. But I also think there’s something genuinely interesting in the fact that every piece of type you’ve ever read was a choice — someone sat somewhere and picked this shape for these letters and decided it was right — and almost nobody ever thinks about that. The choices are everywhere and they’re invisible and they work on you anyway.
Anyway. If you don’t know what Futura looks like I’m genuinely a little jealous of you. You still have so much world left.