the font hunt

There are people who call themselves performance artists, social media specialists, internet SEO consultants, and worst of all, self-named wedding photographers.  All you have to do these days to be a wedding photographer is buy a Nikon D3x, set up a website and matching business cards.*  And take pictures at funny angles.  Y’know.  Edgy. And for the record, standing on an apple crate peeing on yourself while reading Das Kapital wearing only a toupée is not performance art; it’s called inebriation.

I think the same is true of font designers.  Designing a good font is a very delicate and tricky business.  Between a great, readable and stylish font and something horrible like Bradley’s Hand there is a great gulf fixed.  Some people attempt to swim the gulf and get this.

Killing Comic Sans, however, is great fun.

The reason I am so anti-bad font right now is that I spent the last few days looking for a font I wanted for our web design and branding.  I was looking for a font that was as close as humanly possible to the routed font the National Park Service uses on those cool signs that instantly take me to the Trailhead of Paradise.

Problem is, there are literally over 150,000 fonts.  My conclusion after hours of staring at the computer, wincing noticeably, is that 145,000 of them should be illegal.  Like these.

Imagine my joy when I found Simpliciter Sans.  I may have even shouted “Eureka” and left from my bath naked and ran through the streets of Syracuse.  Hey, it felt that way after a lot of this:

So…Simpliciter Sans.

I’m tellin’ you…that’s it, and it was worth it, for sure.  A little Photoshop and we made it look like it had been engraved in a slab of cedar and screwed to a post in Yellowstone near a geyser basin, reading:

Take a step back, Junior Ranger.
We hate carting out parboiled corpses.

Respectfully submitted (in Times New Roman),

Canoelover

*If you want to see what real wedding photographers do, go here or  here.  NOT here.