Perhaps you will recognize someone you know in this list, maybe an uncle or your youngest child or maybe a neighbor or just a good friend. Sure, they look like the rest of us on the outside but inside of their brains rage an addiction that the internet just can’t quench. Everyday fonts just leave these people cold and distant, poor kerning and letter spacing drive them mad, widows and orphans make them homicidal. Which type are you?
1. Print-o-holics: The printoholic is someone who prefers to be in touch with the world through printed materials. These addicts subscribe to home delivery of their newspapers, magazines and prefer snail mail to email. How can this be? They are receiving information through a vessel that controls the typography, the printing press. You get to choose actual fonts with printed materials and not vague families of fonts like on the internet.
The printoholic jumps out of bed and runs outside to grab their New York Times even before drinking their coffee. They wear ink-stained fingers as a badge of honor often refusing to wash their hands after the Sunday paper typography binge. Junk mail gets opened and read just to see Friz Quadrata, Berthold Akzidenz Grotesque and Copperplate Gothic Bold. They usually own stock in the International Typeface Corporation (ITC.)
2. Type Morons – The type moron gets so hung up on typography that they fail to comprehend the message of the words at all. To a type moron, words are total abstractions with no meaning beyond the forms of their magnificent creation. A type moron “reads” everything as if it is written in Japanese, beautiful to look at without trying to impose any meaning from it. These people usually get promoted to management positions rather easily or they go into politics. You can usually recognize a type moron because they usually rotate their reading material while they read it or enjoy holding it upside down as they marvel at the serifs and ligatures.
3. Kindle Stompers – The Kindle stomper cannot tolerate anyone in their immediate vicinity who is using an electronic information delivery system (EIDS) and/or tablet/smart phone to read from. These highly agitated and aggressive typography addicts despise Arial, Times or Comic Sans so greatly that they will grab a Kindle and smash it to pieces in an effort to save mankind from poor typography. They are kind-hearted after the act exclaiming that they were only trying to save a poor orphan or rescue a widow. The Kindle stomper can often be seen in restaurants and theaters scanning the crowd like a secret service agent ever vigilant for their raison d’etre – protecting us from bad typefaces and typography. Watch that Kindle!
4. The Spontaneous Typography Corrector – This creature just cannot stand bad typography at all and they cannot control themselves in attempting to correct the grievous errors of utterly abysmal typeface choices that we must live with daily. You can recognize the typography corrector in a powerpoint presentation by the groans and laughter and knee-jerk guffaws that escape their lips when bouncing type, multicolored fonts or flashing text suddenly emanate from the screen. The spontaneous typography corrector goes a step further however and tries to fix the poor presentation in the moment, often times pushing their way to the podium and taking command of the laptop itself. They simply can’t help themselves, much like Asbergers Syndrone sufferers, and they ask to fix the god-awful typography on the spot, or they will die. These addicts really suffer greatly. They want to correct highway signs, TV newscasts, storefront signs and neon signs immediately and often risk their personal safety on the spot to do it. They are usually carrying paint or ladders with them in the city.
5. The Expert Typographer – The expert suffers with this addiction much the same as Shakespeare suffered through his childrens school plays or Picasso suffered through his church’s art auctions. To find oneself in a sea of banal mediocrity as far as one can see is a horrible condition and the experrt typographer is really no different in trying to navigate through life in a hell-hole of ghastly and amateurish typography. This personal hell is one that mere therapy cannot fix. Isolation works for some of these experts, either in a room empty of all letterforms of all types or on a tiny island with a netting shield to prevent messages in bottles from washing ashore. I am sure that there are many typography experts who gather to commiserate the sad state that communication has devolved into and for these wretched souls we can only offer our deepest sympathy.
These addictions are not spoken of very frequently and as such as the addiction really has no allies in the public sector lobbying for them. As evidenced, Oprah Winfrey, Deepak Chopra nor the Huffington Post has ever addressed the situation of typography addiction in any meaningful way. Neither has Fox News. It’s a sad state of affairs, to say the least.
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