Image via Complex Original
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Reader, as a clothing fanatic, you know that design is important and that a single millimeter of fabric more or less can make the difference between a gawd and a frump. But clothing is not the only craft where subtle aesthetic choices can transform our general impression of something. For example, the way text is formatted can alter your reading experience dramatically without you really being able to put your finger on why. Sure, part of it is layout, but there's something really interesting about fonts. It's hard to pay attention to a font when you're reading: Typically, the typeface becomes seemingly transparent as you stop looking at the particular shape of the letters to focus on the concepts that the letters produce when grouped together. However, every font projects a very specific mood, and picking out a font is just as significant a choice as picking out a shirt. So, what do these choices mean?
Emily Lever is a French-American writer who wishes she led a life of adventure. You can follow her on Twitter here.
2.typograhy
3.courier new
Courier New
You're an aspiring investigative reporter for The New York Times who tucks a pencil behind his ear and is obsessed with the "Golden Age of Journalism." Every night you play old recordings of Walter Cronkite's voice as you drift off into dreams of a world that makes sense, where there are only three TV channels and the President trembles at every tap of your keyboard.
That or you just want to inflate the page count on your high school journalism paper.
4.Times new roman
Times New Roman
You only eat beige foods, only drink Bud Light and only shop at The Gap because you were never aware that anything existed beyond the default option until you were too set in your ways to greet new and exciting things with anything but knee-jerk terror. You're completely missing out on life.
5.cambria
Cambria
You cannot tell one serif font from another and you think you're using Times New Roman when you're actually using an uglier knockoff of Times New Roman.
6.lucida blackletter
Lucida Blackletter
You read The Silmarillion religiously at every lunar eclipse and tell everyone who's willing to listen that it's way better than The Lord of the Rings. Not that this isn't true or anything. You may or may not commune spiritually with small, sun-dappled bodies of water.
7.helvetica light
Helvetica Light
You do freelance consulting work (read: giving advice you don't fully understand) for a company whose mission is so obscure that you're not even really sure what it does. All you know is its website says it's "a community of creators, innovators and leaders" and they have an office in SoHo with high ceilings, pale wooden flooring that gleams in the natural light, Juice Press in the company fridge and walking desks everywhere.
8.matura
Matura M7 Script Capitals
Unless you are printing out some haikus you wrote for your third grade English class (that's not a put-down, just the context in which I most recently used that font), you're almost definitely making invitations to a party whose theme is an Eastern culture that you're not from. In short, you are an Orientalist.
9.baskerville
Baskerville
You're on the sixth draft of your Great American Noir Novel, your third marriage (you were never the one to end it), your fourth whiskey today and your last legs, more generally speaking. Sometimes, though, a shining idea comes into your head in the middle of the night and you race to your computer, thinking that this will finally be the spark that changes the course of your life. But everyone in your writing workshop is too small-minded to appreciate your work, always making belittling statements like, "It could've used a little more insight into the characters." HOW MUCH FUCKING INSIGHT DO YOU NEED, SANDRA?
10.hoefler
Hoefler Text
You talk a lot about the importance of going "off the grid" because electronics destroy our ability to connect with the people who truly matter. You rail against consumer culture, clad in All Saints and Yohji Yamamoto. You've deleted your Facebook and never really use your Twitter because you never really understood the purpose the medium. You write sweeping, reactionary blog posts about the depersonalization of the modern world on your iPad.
11.copperplate
Copperplate Gothic Light
You spent waaaaaay too much time designing your business card, while you pictured yourself stunting on all the peasants who lack your acute aesthetic eye. Paul Allen's business card is really fucking ugly and his abuse of drop caps is more horrifying than anything Patrick Bateman does, but that's neither here nor there.
Basically, your problem is that you tend to mistake pretension and self-importance for beauty.
12.microsoft
Microsoft Sans Serif
You are the physical incarnation of normcore. You're so normcore that you don't send texts, you just have a pager. You're so normcore you'll wear jeans to a funeral. You're so normcore you are unaffected by the passage of time and exist in a state of stasis as the world shifts and crumbles around you. You're...God?