Come, thou font…

When the personal computer began to invade homes in the late 1980s, people had access to some tools they had never experienced before. Chief among these was the availability of fonts—different styles of lettering. A few fonts came loaded on that new computer, but there were soon thousands of different fonts available. For the obsessive among us, it quickly became a badge of honor to amass a library of as many fonts as we could gather. No longer was a simple missive limited to the common typefaces we recognized as coming from a typewriter. No more were your flyers and posters limited to whatever varieties of “rub-on” letters you bought at the office supply stores. It was an era of changing times…changing Times to Futura or Arial or Poster Bodoni, that is.
The drawback to this bounty was that everyone felt compelled to show off their font collection. Your corporate newsletter soon had ten or twelve different typefaces on the front page alone. Such ostentation meant there was little regard for the actual text, for the message intended for the reader. Desktop publishing instead became a can-you-top-this game: “Hey, look! These letters look like cheese!”
Fonts became as numerous and varied as denominations of churches, and the similarities didn’t end with sheer numbers. It doesn’t matter how fancy your new font is if the words cannot be read. Words—and churches—are for communicating a message. When we become too intent on showing off our edgy new look or our hip facade, we obscure the simple word, the text that pre-existed everything: “In the beginning was the Word.” A word so powerful, so eternal, does not need to be set in 72-point New Century Bold Italic All-Caps. It just needs to be legible, on the page and on the street. The question in your mind should always be: “Do you read me?”