Why does everyone use papyrus

The problem I have with papyrus is similar to that of comic sans. Usage is always key when looking at fonts. Pick something that works for your brand, business and image. Papyrus is the Nickelback of fonts. Or maybe the other way around. A word on Papyrus from David Sivo: […]. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account.

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Bradley Hand is one of the worst offenders: a cheap font that has been used in too many invitations and personal greetings to slip under the radar.

But other handwritten fonts are just as annoying, as are the many tacky script-style fonts used in party invitations and gift-shop signage. Courier makes sense for certain uses: screenplays, code, plain text documents.

But its disproportional lettering and typewriter aesthetic makes it unsuitable for web designers. Papyrus is the king of bad fonts.

Equal parts childish, kitschy and irritating, this ugly piece of typography has found its way into everything from film posters Avatar , anyone? It has become such a universal annoyance that several anti-Papyrus blogs have popped up. As with Comic Sans, avoid this typeface if you want to be taken seriously. Kitschy, cheap and vile, Papyrus has no place in your designs.

He is an year-old business owner and entrepreneur from Sydney, Australia. Explore amazing typefaces created by independent creatives from around the world.

Not all fonts are created equal. Created by Chris Costello in , little did he know that his personal project would take the world by storm first positively, then negatively. The accidental typeface was made during the many long downtimes when he was working as an entry-level staff illustrator in an ad agency.

His doodles on parchment were inspired by the Middle East and Biblical Times. Then 23 years old, it was his very first typeface. He sent it to small and big companies in the type industry. For example, when Garamond was first designed, Claude Garamond was aiming to mimic scribed letterforms — letters drawn with a broad-nibbed pen.

Because of this calligraphic influence on Garamond, Garamond has stroke variation. By contrast, a modern sans-serif typeface such as Helvetica has very little stroke variation. Comic Sans and Papyrus differ in stroke variation. Comic Sans, which mimics letters drawn by a marker, has no stroke variation. Papyrus, which mimics letters drawn by a broad-nibbed pen, does have stroke variation. This is where good typefaces include some subtle stroke variation.

Helvetica has almost no stroke variation, but where the shoulder meets the stem, the stroke of the shoulder is slightly thinner. By contrast, Comic Sans has no stroke variation at this point.

As you can see, this creates a very heavy area. This heavy area contributes to an uneven texture in body copy. The shoulder of the n is thinner where it departs from the stem. This is an inherent quality of a typeface with stroke variation, and you can see Papyrus shares this quality with Garamond. It helped Papyrus manage visual weight well, which helped it present an even overall texture. I had to move on to other type fundamentals.

Good typefaces are made up of a series of shapes, which are repeated from one letter to another. This helps balance the visual weight consistently from one letter to the next, thus contributing to an even texture overall.

Any deviations you see of the shape are specifically created to help balance the visual weight within that letter. The variations from one letter to the next are haphazard — which is, of course, the idea behind the child-like writing. When I conducted the same analysis on Papyrus, however, I was shocked to see how consistent the forms were from one letter to the next. You can see the careful hand of the imaginary scribe writing these letters.

The angle of the nib is consistent, and the shapes followed to draw the letters are consistent. This compensation counterintuitively makes Papyrus more consistent.

The weight was well-managed within the letters, and the letters were consistent with one another. Papyrus shared these qualities with Garamond, while Comic Sans was severely lacking in both of these qualities. Kerning and letterfit help a typeface balance the weight between various letter combinations. Electronic fonts have data within them called kerning tables. The kerning tables determine how close to one another various letter combinations are.

The type designer literally goes through every conceivable letter combination and determines how close either letter in each pairing should be to one another. Here you can see the poor kerning and letterfit between the f and the o of Comic Sans. Comic Sans also has poor letterfit. If you tried to close the white space between the f and the o, the crossbar of the f would get very close to the o. This creates a point of tension. It becomes a distracting point that interrupts the flow of reading, and makes the overall texture uneven.

I could have sworn that Papyrus had kerning or letterfit problems. Quite the contrary. I then scanned my entire body copy sample of Papyrus, looking for points of tension or gaps or other quirks.

It only makes it unusual. This simulates what these might look like as you squint your eyes to try to analyze the textures created by each of these three typefaces. Notice that there are many very dark areas within the block of Comic Sans, contrasted with some relatively light areas.

This level of inconsistency is a large part of what makes Comic Sans a bad font. As a former type snob, I have to admit that some of the appeal of such snobbery is a need to feel superior. Something was still off. Something deeper than the fundamentals. Or, to be more accurate, something more on the surface than the fundamentals.

One day, I found myself in a shopping mall, searching for jeans.