Papyrus: The World's 2nd Most Hated Font

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Accidentally saw Avatar 2 with Open Caption screening. 3 hours of having Papyrus in the screen. I wanted to die.

👍︎︎ 29 👤︎︎ u/ethanwc 📅︎︎ Dec 29 2022 🗫︎ replies

I've always wondered why Papurus gets so much hate. I mean, it's not a favorite, but back in the day it was free and it looked good on Christmas e-cards. 🤷🏼‍♀️

👍︎︎ 12 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Dec 29 2022 🗫︎ replies

Thanks for sharing, I really enjoyed that!

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/wexican_bean 📅︎︎ Dec 29 2022 🗫︎ replies

David Kadavy has a book 50 page book on it, “In defence of papyrus”, enthusiasts can check it out

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/painstation100 📅︎︎ Dec 29 2022 🗫︎ replies

"That one other font no one cares about, but some designers like to make fun of for some reasons even if it’s not that bad (albeit, it was a bit overused in the 2000s but not anymore)."

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/No-Significance-7355 📅︎︎ Dec 29 2022 🗫︎ replies

Truth

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/spinach-e 📅︎︎ Dec 29 2022 🗫︎ replies

Papyrus is best font. And pluto is a planet.

These are the two hills I am prepared to die on

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/lemelisk42 📅︎︎ Dec 31 2022 🗫︎ replies
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There are many ugly fonts in the world, there are  many bad fonts, but there are only a handful of   truly hated fonts. Two names tower over all others  in the field of cringe-inducing typefaces, Comic   Sans and Papyrus. Yet, only one of them infamously  became the subject of a short on Saturday Night   Live. Starring Ryan Gosling as a man driven to  obsession with the font's use as the Avatar logo,   the video has over 18 million YouTube views.  Breaking with SNL tradition Gosling is genuinely   funny. When his therapist reveals they're working  on Avatar sequels, he's relieved. "So they fixed   it? They changed the logo!" Things in the sketch  don't go well from there, but in real life there   is some good news on that front. I spoke with  John Roshell, a prolific designer who co-founded   ComiCraft and now has his own company, Swell  Type. John was commissioned to create a new custom   font for Avatar sequels and spin-offs. The only  conversation we had about Papyrus was when I first   talked to them, they said so you know, like the  day that skit came out, that was it for the day!   Everybody was just sitting there responding to  all their friends who were sending it to him. It   definitely had an impact on them and I think what  they wanted the branding to be for the [sequel]. It   was at least partially driven by the fact that  they were made fun of for it. You could tell   with the logo that they sort of kept that feel,  that rustic feel where it's got the little divots   taken out of it. When they sent me the logo, like  as an Illustrator file, one of the first things I   did was just to kind of clean it up and simplify.  They just said, "We want to extrapolate out a   whole alphabet out of this. Can you do that?" So  it was kind of a matter of just taking those four   or five letters and then kind of building the rest  of it out of that. The uppercase went pretty fast,   the lowercase was a little more challenging. We  tried three or four different kind of approaches   on that until we settled on one. When John posted  about this project on LinkedIn, Chris Costello,   the designer of Papyrus, replied with a  tongue-in-cheek comment. Costello still works   as a graphic designer today and seems quite well  respected for his work in coin and medal design,   including work for the United States Mint  and the Royal Mint in the UK. Having read   many interviews with the man during my  research, it seems he's slowly come to   accept his destiny as having designed one of the  most reviled fonts in pop culture. And with age,   it seems he's been able to find the humour in it.  It's not only SNL who has poked fun. Papyrus has   been the subject of memes and jokes for years. –  “Papyrus, are you kidding me? There's no place for   that in a professional office setting!” – ”Yes!”  But why does it have such a notorious reputation?   Well to answer that question, we're going to have  to go back to the beginning. In the early 1980s, certain things seemed immutable. The popularity of big hair, the unstoppable rise of the Rubik's Cube, and the dominance of paste-up in graphic  design. But as we know, home computing would   soon turn the design industry upside down with  the advent of desktop publishing. The technical   details of paste-up and photo typesetting are  fascinating but will have to wait for another   video. Suffice it to say, it was an arduous  process of physically cutting and pasting page   elements, type, photos and illustrations, onto  a board and aligning everything to grid by hand,   before it was then photographed and converted  to printing plates. But this gave designers   greater creative freedom than they'd had with  metal type. In graphic design, fonts used for   large blocks of text are called body typefaces.  These are usually quite conservative but easy   to read and they try not to draw too much  attention to themselves. On the other hand,   display typefaces are fonts used at large size  for short text like headlines and for advertising.   These fonts could be much more expressive  and eccentric. They're supposed to grab your   attention. And the 1970s and 80s was a time of  rapid growth and development in display typefaces.   This was in large part thanks to a company called  Letraset, which pioneered a new technology known   as “dry transfer lettering”. These were sheets of  alphabets, numbers and other characters printed   on a translucent film with pressure activated  adhesive. To transfer them directly to a layout,   you would just burnish the top side with a pen  or stylus. For customers, dry transfer lettering   was inexpensive, easier to use and allowed more  flexible layout techniques compared with other   available methods. But it was this combined with a  much lower cost to produce and distribute compared   with metal type that helped to propel Letraset  to huge success. Fast forward to 1982 and a   23-year-old Chris Costello is working as a junior  illustrator at a Florida ad agency. It's his first   job out of art school and they hit a three month  lull in business. Being a devout Christian and the   son of a sign writer, he begins playing around  with lettering and starts imagining what the   Latin alphabet might have looked like in biblical  times. Based on these sketches, he creates an all   uppercase alphabet and pitches it to nearly  a dozen different typehouses. Only Letraset   writes back. Now Letraset was the clear market  leader within their niche with a huge catalog of   well-known fonts including Helvetica, Futura and  other famous typefaces they licensed from other   foundries. But they were also an incubator of new  talent, especially when it came to display fonts.   They offered a subscription to agencies, bureaus  and design studios called "Letragraphica" which   shipped new display typefaces in the post every  month. Any unused sheets were simply mailed   back to Letraset. This was a brilliant business  model because it allowed them to take a gamble   on new fonts from unproven talent without making  a commitment to mass production or putting them   directly into their main catalog. And so Letraset  purchased Papyrus for the Letragraphica program   for only £750, debuting in 1983. Of course a  sketch is not the same thing as production artwork   for a typeface. The transfer sheets were all  created using photographic production techniques.   The British type designer Freda Sack began  her career at the Letraset Type Studio and she   described the process in an interview. The work  was meticulous, and accuracy was essential… Having   measured and analysed all the different aspects  and features of a particular typeface we would   make a ‘jig’ as a template, draw the outlines, and  then cut the Rubylith... at between four and six   inches cap height. Although with more intricate  designs – we worked at much larger sizes… Although   termed ‘Instant Lettering’ the creation of  it was far from an instant process. It used   to take one person around four to six weeks to  draw, cut and space one typeface… If we weren’t   working on the ‘classic’ range, it would be on  ideas for typefaces sent in by type enthusiasts…   Most of the submitted typefaces were supplied to  Letraset as quite rough smaller scale drawings,   sometimes just as marker sketches, and all had  to be drawn up, and in most cases a fuller range   of letters designed… During most of the time  that Letraset was producing typefaces, it was   an accessible alternative to traditional hot metal  type setting… I suppose you could say it helped in   the democratisation of type. The following year,  Papyrus made it into Letraset's front catalogue,   but it wasn't particularly noteworthy. It was just  one of many novelty display fonts they published.   Some have stood the test of time, and others not  so much. Papyrus could have easily joined the   latter group and been forgotten by pop culture if  it wasn't for a twist of fate over a decade later.   When Microsoft released Publisher in 1991,  it signaled that desktop publishing was   going mainstream. Publisher wasn't intended to  compete with software for design professionals   like PageMaker or QuarkXPress. It was marketed to  a different crowd, advertised as making it easy   to create professional-quality newsletters,  business cards, brochures and more. In late   '97 they released an update to the Small  Business Edition of Microsoft Office with   the newly released Publisher 98. This version  included the headline feature “Clipart Live”,   which put Microsoft Clipart on the internet  for the first time. But that wasn't all. It   also included a new suite of display fonts,  including Papyrus. Fast forward a few years   and Papyrus came installed by default with any  version of Microsoft Office. Before broadband   internet was widely available, having your font  bundled by Microsoft was a huge deal. It was   kind of like being picked out of obscurity to  be signed by a major record label in the time   before streaming music. It meant millions of users  without any knowledge of typography had access to   your font. In 2003 Apple included Papyrus as a  system font with their operating system as well,   reaching an even bigger install base. But  the versions from Microsoft and Apple were   not exactly the same. So let's pause to take a  closer look at the design of the font itself.   The ragged edges of Papyrus don't come from real  ink over paper. This was made in the time before   high resolution digital scanning, so even if the  original sketches had been made on highly textured   paper stock that just was not a possibility. The  original masters are still in the collection of St   Bride Library, and we can see the original design  was meant to be even more weathered, with patches   of white space within the strokes. But these  were retouched out at the last minute, likely   because when reduced down to size the detail was  either lost or created other issues. Papyrus has   a handwritten style, but it's not calligraphy  or cursive. It's made up of mostly block letters   with some unusual traits. In his original doodles,  Costello was clearly experimenting with different   styles of calligraphy, including Uncial, Blackletter and Italic. But the final result shows   very little of that, except for the distended bowl  of the uppercase U, which has an Uncial flavour.   There are other quirks in the uppercase, like  the high crossbar on the E, F and H, for example.   Originally, Costello's design didn't include a lower  case, but it was added on request from Letraset.   As a result, the two cases feel a bit detached.  For example, the capital and lower case U don't   match. But that distinctive bowl is found on the  lower case Y. The x-height is also quite short for   a handwritten style, giving us unusually tall  ascenders. And instead of the single-storey A   and G found in handwriting, it uses double-storey  versions more commonly found in type. Here we have   the original master sketch, and we can see two  sets of capital letters. A larger set with swash   variants and a smaller set. Now small caps are not  unusual and are usually found in body text serif   faces like Garamond or Palatino. But Papyrus  doesn't have regular caps and small caps. No,   these are regular capitals and these are oversized  titling capitals. Because dry transfer lettering   came in sheets of only one point size, it meant  that small caps weren't very useful for display   text. But when the font was translated to digital  form, Apple's version used the regular capital   letters by default, while Microsoft went with  the oversized set, which was never intended to   be mixed with the lower case. Compare the same  text in these two different versions. This is   part of why so much Papyrus looks terrible. The  proportions are just plain wrong. The titling   caps aren't even aligned to the same baseline.  Personally, I think it does look better in all   caps with titling initials as originally intended.  Letraset's own catalog from 1985 also seems to   favour this configuration in their examples. So we  just talked about the major problems with Papyrus   and why it's kind of an odd font. I'm personally  not a huge fan and I don't think many other   graphic designers are either. But the core audience  for Papyrus had moved on from the domain of design   professionals. Microsoft and then Apple made this  font available to the general public. And there's   something about it that a lot of people like.  So let's talk about what it did right. There's   a certain quirky charm to Papyrus. Its handwritten  effect has a casual appeal that sets it apart from   other default Microsoft Office fonts. It's not too  stuffy or formal, but it's still highly legible.   More so than many true handwriting fonts. So say  it's 1998 and you want a font that's easy to read,   but still has a bit of personality. Papyrus might  be the way to go. Of course in 2022 we have a lot   more options than the system fonts that come  with Office. But where do you go to find new   and interesting fonts? Well, a great option  would be this video's sponsor. Envato Elements   is a subscription service that gives you access to  over 11 million creative assets, including fonts,   graphics, templates, brushes and more. With Envato  Elements you can easily find the perfect font for   any project. Whether it's something casual and  handwritten with the friendliness of Papyrus or a   clean, elegant sans serif. And if you want that  worn, grungy texture, they've got you covered   with a wide range of texture effects and add-ons  for Adobe and other software. Plus their library   is constantly growing, so you'll never run out of  creative options. I use Elements myself both for   my videos and as a graphic designer. I love their  diverse and easy to use library and the fact that   their B Corp certified is just the cherry on  top. Their prices are also very reasonable and   the unlimited downloads mean I never have to worry  about going over budget on creative assets. So if   you want to up your design game or are looking  for high quality assets for your next creative   project, definitely check out Envato Elements.  Using my link below will get you a 7 day free   trial and you can keep any assets you download  even if you decide to cancel. So there's nothing   to lose. Big thanks to Envato. By the late 2000s, Papyrus was reaching saturation point. Nobody can begrudge a grandma using Papyrus for  her stand at the church bake sale, but things   were getting out of hand. By 2008 there were two  separate blogs solely devoted to showcasing tacky   and inappropriate use of the font. This coincided  with the peak of hate for Comic Sans, which points   to just how massive Microsoft's influence was on  popular typography at this time. As the smartphone   era began with the launch of the iPhone in  2007, things would slowly begin to change,   but even into the 2010s, Windows and Office had a  major presence in people's lives. Most folks only   ever used fonts that came pre-installed on their  computer. This meant that small sign-writers and   print shops often used fonts that were familiar  to their clients even if they weren't the best   choice from a design perspective. Papyrus, for  as much as design snobs hated it, was extremely   appealing to many people. As a result, a lot of  small businesses used the font for signage and   promotional material. In the 2000s, the concept of  wellness also became increasingly mainstream from   yoga to organic food. And before it became big  business, a lot of this stuff was grass roots or   homemade, creating flyers for their workshops  or labels for their organic granola at home,   often using their own printer and Papyrus to  express a rejection of the industrial modern   consumer lifestyle and an alternative that was  “natural”. In 2009, the release of James Cameron's   blockbuster Avatar pushed the font even further  into the spotlight. The film featured a humanoid   alien race called the Na’vi. Not only was the logo  for the film based on Papyrus, but it was also   used for the captions whenever the Na’vi spoke in  their alien tongue. This decision received a lot   of criticism for many reasons, which I think  are well captured in the viral SNL sketch.   At the time, Avatar was a huge deal. The budget  for the film was $237 million and the budget for   promotion was a further $150 million. So using  a free system font that you might find on the   sign for a strip mall nail salon felt glaringly  out of place. It's the typographic equivalent to   the latest Marvel blockbuster, getting a cameo  appearance from Spider-Man, but it's actually   just some dude in a cheap Halloween costume.  Especially amongst graphic designers, it was seen   as a ridiculous choice. In the skit, Gosling is  obsessed in part because he thinks Papyrus seems   like such an indifferent choice. But here, I'm  going to disagree. When a typeface becomes well   known, it's usually because it finds a niche.  It comes to mean something beyond what the text   itself might say. For example, Trajan becoming the  movie poster font which, according to Yves Peters,   happened in large part thanks to it becoming part  of Adobe's default type library. Or the use of   Gotham as a font for politicians and governments  in general since its use for the successful Obama   campaign in 2008. Papyrus has certainly not  escaped this. To promote the Avatar sequel,   The Way of Water, Empire magazine crowd sourced  an interview with James Cameron with questions   submitted from actors, showbiz types and  surprisingly, one Chris Costello. For better   or for worse, Papyrus is widely used to represent  indigenous themes as well as all things organic,   natural and new-agey. Was the decision to use this  font in Avatar at all inspired by its association   today with Native American culture? Cameron's  answer is rather glib, claiming it was a decision   by the art department he didn't really look that  hard at. Clearly, Cameron is no Wes Anderson. He   makes a passing reference to the SNL skit while  laughing off the larger question that this raises,   which is pretty ironic in a magazine literally  called Empire. I've discussed how typographic   stereotypes work in my previous video on Chop  Suey fonts, so I'm not going to rehash it here.   But you don't have to scratch too deep to see  the exoticism implied by the use of Papyrus   in Avatar. Cherokee writer and artist Roy Boney  Jr. wrote about his experience in 2015. Papyrus   has become an oft-used font for anything  Indigenous… But harm comes from the symbolism   of Papyrus being tied to ideas such as nature  and ancientness. It paints us as noble mystic   savages while forcing us to continually live  as relics of the past. These are the same ideas   used throughout history to subvert us as people  in attempts to destroy our cultures, languages,   and land bases. It belittles our standing as  vibrant, 21st-century people with strong cultures.   Far from being a careless choice, Papyrus is the  perfect embodiment of Avatar. The film's plot is   famously generic. This led to multiple lawsuits  alleging plagiarism on the part of James Cameron,   all of which failed. But in the course of one 2012  suit brought by Gerald Morawski, Cameron submitted   a 45 page, sworn declaration detailing how he  developed the concept and script for Avatar,   concluding with a summary of his influences.  My reference points were diverse, from serious   films about Europeans or Americans immersing in  indigenous cultures such as Lawrence of Arabia,   The Man Who Would Be King, The Emerald Forest,  Medicine Man, and The Mission to animated films   such as The Jungle Book and FernGully. They  included the Tarzan jungle stories and science   fiction novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the  adventure stories of Rudyard Kipling and H.   Rider Haggard. Avatar has been criticised for its  primitivism, exoticism and perpetuating the cliche   of the White Saviour. And while this isn't the  main topic of this video, it's worth mentioning   that if you needed a greatest hits of these  harmful tropes, James Cameron's Netflix queue   isn't a bad place to start. While its indigenous  connotations are some of its most corrosive,   I think it's worth acknowledging how broad a set  of ideas Papyrus has become associated with. In   the visual language of food, for example, Papyrus  has been used to signal any foreign cuisine,   regardless of its origin. It could be anything  from sushi to feta cheese to jerk chicken. There's   also the association with the organic and natural,  and with new age and alternative spirituality.   But why is that? If you look at the design of  Papyrus, there's nothing particularly exotic   about its letterforms. Going back to the original  development sketches, we see mostly European   calligraphy styles as inspiration. So what is it  about the design that has led to such a strong   association with these concepts? In 2019, author  and blogger David Kavady wrote an article called   "In Defense of Papyrus" which is over 6000 words  long. While it contains some technical errors and   repeats some common myths about Papyrus' origin,  I think Kavady's central argument is spot on.   Papyrus breaks the rule of material honesty, which  in design and architecture is the practice of   using materials in a way that is true to their  natural properties without attempting to hide   or disguise them. The artificial rough texture  of Papyrus is a bit like how a child might age   a treasure map by staining it with tea or coffee  and burning the edges. It's trying to come off as   something that it's not. This is a big reason  for both Papyrus' viral appeal and conversely   the reason so many find it garish. This material  dishonesty specifically falls into a subcategory I   like to call "exaggerated patina". You can see  examples of this kind of thing all over film   and television. Whenever a medieval village is  depicted, it's usually dirty, brown and dingy.   Or whenever a scene takes place in Mexico or the  Middle East, there's a sudden aggressive yellow or   orange colour grade. These visual cues are meant  to quickly communicate that a place or time is   different from our own, but they're not value  neutral. There are visual shorthand for showing   that a place is "other", maybe even "primitive"  or "dangerous". This is in contrast to the reverse   trope of sci-fi colour grading, where scenes set  in the future or featuring advanced technology are   often depicted with a distinctly cold colour  grade. Avatar is a rare exception where both   tropes are combined, the sci-fi colour palette,  together with the primitive patina of Papyrus.   Today, while it's hardly become an obscure font,  you're less likely to find Papyrus out in the   wild than just a decade ago. This isn't because  the font has become shunned, per se, but more a   reflection of technology moving forward. In the  age of smartphones and social media, Microsoft   have been declining in relevance. People today  are just as likely to use Google Docs or Canva   as they are to use Microsoft Office. And most of  what we read is online on our phones, not in hard   copy documents. The centre of gravity has shifted,  and Google fonts now have much more influence on   popular typography than ones from Microsoft.  So does Papyrus deserve its bad reputation?   Some people say that the opposite of love is not  hatred, but indifference. And whatever else may be   said, Papyrus does not evoke indifference  in people. Another font is good or bad,   is highly context specific. Like its notorious  classmate, Comic Sans, its major sins were being   too eccentric and too accessible at the same  time. Ultimately, Papyrus was not just a product   of the time that created it, but of the last 40  years in type technology. Desktop publishing and   home computers killed Letraset, but Microsoft gave  Papyrus a second career, making it one of the most   used and abused typefaces of the 20th century.  It was a friendly face in a gallery of otherwise   serious type options. It became a shorthand for  yoga classes, herbal tea, and a catch-all signifier   of otherness. It might be one of the most obnoxious  and genuinely hated fonts of all time, but Papyrus   might also be one of the last fonts that was ever  truly a household name. I hope you enjoyed this   deep dive on the world's second most hated font.  Special thanks as always to my patrons over on   Patreon. As this video goes live, I'm just going  to be shy of 100,000 subscribers, which is a crazy   milestone. Thank you to everyone who has watched,  and if you also would like to support the channel,   there's a new $1 a month level on Patreon if you  want to see some longer versions of interviews   with my guests like John Roshell and other behind  the scenes shenanigans. If you enjoyed watching   this and want to keep watching, I highly recommend  you watch either my breakdown on the Top 10 Most   influential Microsoft Fonts over here, or my deep  dive on the origins of Chop Suey lettering, over   here. My name is Linus, thank you for watching,  and I hope I'll see you in a future video.
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Channel: Linus Boman
Views: 329,987
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Papyrus, Chris Costello, Avatar, Avatar sequel, Comiccraft, Microsoft fonts, Comic Sans, hated font, SNL, ryan gosling, video essay, avatar font
Id: 3t1D3ebc6h0
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 25min 35sec (1535 seconds)
Published: Wed Dec 28 2022
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