Ellie Usher

            This week we watched a few YouTube videos. The first was called “A Defense of Comic Sans”. This was a video of a man who was defending the font Comic Sans. I thought this was a very funny video. Personally, I had never considered the fonts that I do not like. Apparently, there are many people that despise this font. He made many interesting points throughout the video about how the font was disliked because it was like the handwriting of a child. He showed a graph demonstrating that we love things more and more as they appear more human, until they get to a point in which they are too human. If something not real too closely resembles something human, we begin to fear it. There is a theory that the hatred of Comic Sans comes from looking too human. He ended his video with a very interesting sentence stating that, “Today it is possible for the whole world of thought to be made legible and be shared by the whole world.” This was a concept that blew my mind a little bit. He had previously spoken to the fact that in the past, everything was written by hand. When we entered the digital age, we entered a time in which sharing information is as simple as a few clicks. This is a fascinating concept to me, that the whole world can literally be at a person’s fingertips.

            The second video we watched was “How Stranger Things got its retro title sequence”. This video talked about the creation of the Stranger Things intro and how it has the effect of being so old. The creator of the sequence took samples of old title sequences, as well as old books, and looked at those fonts. After trying several different fonts, they settled on one. This was an interesting video because I had never taken into consideration the fonts that appear around me. I see these choices constantly, but have never thought about how much work is put into finding the proper font. In type such as the name of a TV show or movie, they must look for the best font to represent the show, not just any random font that they can find.

            These videos pointed out to me the significance of choosing the proper font. If you were to choose a font like Comic Sans, many people would be annoyed and find it childish and unprofessional. You have to be sure, when choosing your font that you chose something that best represents the point you are trying to get across in whatever it is that you are doing.