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Font-geeking and time-dependent aesthetics
I've had an interest in fonts1 since I was a teenager. I've never represented myself as an expert in typography or font design, but I can pick out a few more specific fonts than most people and I occasionally have strong opinions about which ones people should (or more often shouldn't) have used in a given piece of text.
Some of those opinions are basically orthodox: Comic Sans is the wrong font for almost anything, Arial is slightly inferior to Helvetica.
Some of them are really quite strong: when I was a teenager I used to find that text in Souvenir made me feel physically ill. I have a stronger stomach these days, admittedly, but I still think it's pretty ugly.
Also, I go off fonts due to overuse. I haven't been able to look Garamond in the face since I was about fifteen, not because there's anything wrong with it but solely because at that age I had occasional employment DTPing a lot of internal quality control forms for a friend's dad's small business; their house style involved Garamond (or some indistinguishable cheap knockoff of it) and after a while I found I was heartily sick of it because it reminded me of that work.
What's particularly annoying to me, though, is when I go off a font that I had particularly liked before. I used to be very fond of Utopia, for instance, and was therefore delighted that it was readily available in free software distributions. However, it turned out that its distinctively square look was a nice place to visit but not somewhere I'd want to live.
Another one in this category, in fact even more so, is Bembo, which seems like quite a popular font to use for (among other things) SF books. When I first noticed Bembo I really liked it, because although the base form is yet another unremarkable serif font, its italics are distinctive (by their narrow and slightly pointy general shape, and also notably the squashed g and the serif at the bottom of the y) and gorgeous. It has one practical downside that I've noticed, namely that the tail on the (roman) R is long enough to put large and unsightly spaces in the middle of all-
Unfortunately, everyone seems to have noticed this, and the effect is that it's become so overused that I now can't see it without feeling a bit bored by it. And that's really annoying, because it is gorgeous and I entirely understand why people still use it.
It's particularly annoying because I normally have relatively little patience with changing fashions; I don't want to be the sort of person who cares whether some given thing is this year's or last year's fashion, I want to be the sort who judges as objectively as possible whether it looks good and lets that be an end of it. I realise that my aesthetic perceptions will be subconsciously influenced by my changing environment in spite of my best efforts in this area, but at the very least I want to be the sort of person who digs in his heels and resists that fact to the limits of his ability rather than embracing it enthusiastically. So to begin disliking a font which I still think is gorgeous on the basis that it's overused represents something of a failure for me, and that annoys me even more than the overuse of the font itself.
(I'm inspired to post this by having been irritated by both Utopia and Bembo over the course of the weekend, which caused what's normally a subconscious irritation to come to the surface of my brain and allow me to see exactly what was irritating about it.)
1. yes, yes, ‘typefaces’ is more accurate, but the difference isn't critical to anything I do, and ‘font’ is faster to type and say.
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Even allowing for explanatory footnotes?
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As an example I feel is very similar, I often have to test audio equipment by playing music through it. My very favourite tracks I never use as test material, and I go sparingly with anything I'm even slightly fond of, changing what tracks I'm using quite frequently. For simple "is it working?" tests, I'll use any old crap.
At my previous employer,
I believe this marks me out as a sane and rational person.
(PS: Palatino. New Century Schoolbook.
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That's an oversimplification, I think, which obscures the differences between my example cases and yours. There's a difference between novelty being one's primary reason for liking something and that wearing off after a while, and on the other hand lack of novelty being an actively negative property which outweighs the thing's significant non-novelty-related good points. And there's a difference between getting sick of something because you or someone near you has been using it for a purpose outside its intended one (test tracks), and getting sick of something solely because it was being used in its intended way and was a victim of its own success. Finally, there's a false dichotomy implied between "wrong" and "natural": not everything natural is good, and it's perfectly possible – and reasonable – for something to be both natural and wrong, or (as in this case) both natural and something that irritates me and that I wish happened less.
I wouldn't be nearly so annoyed – perhaps just a little sad if I realised it – if after years of exposure to Bembo I had stopped enjoying its elegant italics, stopped noticing it at all, and now just treated it as basically unremarkable background to the actual text printed in it. What I dislike is that it's managed to start having a negative emotional effect on me, and that's by no means an obviously inevitable phenomenon.
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Bembo's very nice. I haven't seen so many things set in it as to put me off it, for which I'm grateful. I have a cookery book set in Cheltenham (which somewhat resembles Souvenir) and can't bear to open it.
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That's interesting about fashion. *New* fashion is popular because it's different. But *current* fashion is popular because it's what everyone else has. Simply because it's like fashion isn't a bad thing, liking something only because of fashion is what you may be proud of not tending to do.
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"typography is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters"
My favourite at the moment is Goudy (http://www.identifont.com/list?2+goudy+9+ERL+3214+O0+1492+6E6+528+5A1+461+5T3+440+6NN+433+C5K+416+4YT+413+3RL+313+MG+219+6VY+209+7NS+202+RW+137+KRC+114+24Q+96+24R+87+L8X+84+5A5+66+3PN+42+3PM+12+6WD+7+62J+0+6E4+0+62H+0+KZR+0+KZV+0+KRA+0+GV2+0+44X+0+62I+0+KZZ+0+ERF+0+F69+0+24S+0+62G+0+L03+0+L07+0+LXT+0+3RK+0+LTX+0+24T+0+3PL+0+L0B+0+L0F+0+ERP+0+LTS+0+L8Z+0+ZE+0+KRD+0+L90+0+3RN+0+3PO+0+HVG+0+MH+0+HVF+0+LNK+0+5A2+0+L8Y+0+ERR+0+ERS+0+IAU+0+HYJ+0) but only in print because it breaks up on screen so the current solution is to thicken the bits that break, which ruins it.
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Oh, that's amusing, too. The shapes of the serifs on the left of the B and D jumped out at me as particularly pretty. Then I realised they were reminding me of another font. After a couple of false starts, I realised what: Garamond! Goudy appears to have some of Garamond's good points, but to be just enough unlike Garamond that it doesn't instantly remind me of doing tedious DTP of ISO 9000 forms. Which can only be a good thing :-)
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I actually know exactly what you're talking about with Bembo, although I'll admit it wasn't a font I recognized the name of. I have over-used both Garamond and Bodoni in personal documents to the point where I can no longer use either, and find them both somewhat disheartening or even unpleasant. I too get physical reactions to fonts.
When I set up the tutoring company with friends, one of the things I did was to reprint the same paragraph in multiple fonts to find which they liked the best. The result was Bookman Old Style, which will probably go the way of Garamond and Bodoni in my mind eventually, but which for now I find refreshing and new. It's a very nice font to use for 'education' I think - there is something about it that smacks of school books, and perhaps even the 'learning to write' books where you trace the letters. Something about the height-to-width ratio, I think. (My friends thought I was insane for even thinking about it. Clearly they underestimate the power of a good font, or worse, a bad one.)
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Incidentally, I notice that Adobe's Bembo Std (http://store2.adobe.com/cfusion/store/html/index.cfm?store=OLS-UK&event=displayFontPackage&code=1297) includes alternate "R" glyphs with shorter tails.
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This week I read a novel set in a rather nice serif font I hadn't seen before, which Identifont pegged for me as Dante, and whose italics impressed me in particular (I keep thinking it's a shame Identifont doesn't show italics). The novel itself wasn't outstanding, but the font made it a pleasure to read nonetheless.