Not to get all Joey’s Blog on you, but let’s talk fonts for a second.
I fucking hate the papyrus font. Its hideous. I’ve hated it for years, and I’ve ranted about my hatred into many an uncaring ear. It’s a Microsoft Word font that looks dated the second you type a letter. It is supposedly elegant, but using a Microsoft Word default font to define your “elegance” is like putting on one of those “hot body in a bikini” shirts then telling everyone that you actually DO have a hot body.
My first time coming across the font, I was around 16 years old, and I was looking for something to use on the cover of a CD-R I was burning of a Camel album. Camel is a faux Pink Floyd shitty band and burning CD’s of their music will inevitably land you in Papyrus territory, the domain of shitty bands, christian bookmarks, organic groceries/perfumeries/drycleaners, and uhh…things like this:
via Papyrus Watch
Anyway, as I made my awful Camel CD-R packaging, I came across the font and thought, wow! What a great font to use for the COVER I’m DESIGNING for this awesome PROG-ROCK CD-R I’m burning! Are you starting to see the mindset of a Papyrus user? So I finished the cover, looked at what I had done, marveled at my genius, then (thankfully) caught myself, realized how fucking stupid the whole thing was, cancelled the CD in Nero and put on Formulas Fatal to the Flesh by Morbid Angel.
Ahh, with that, we can move forward.
Anyway, In college I used to work at an internet radio station. The station was staffed by bookish weirdos, date rapists, and kids in back braces. It was the Garbage Pail Kids (Ryan West excluded) running online shows for their parents and two other mutants in their hometown of Beloit, WI to hear. I’d like to think I was one of the few “cool” kids involved, but really I was just another variation on the dork/dweeb/spazz theme. There was one kid, whose name I will change, lets call him (Z)Evan. I absolutely despised Zevan, partly because he was a smarmy little prick with a face that could fit a thousand fists, partly because he loved ZWAN, and wouldn’t shut up about it. Ok, it was mainly because he loved Zwan…seriously…who listens to Zwan? People who like the Papyrus font.
Anyway, there was some kind of design discussion going on, and I pulled out my old routine blah blah blah papyrus, and he looks me straight in the face and says “Oh man, I LOVE the papyrus font”. Blood filled my eyes, my hands turned to bricks. If only he knew how close he came to becoming a vessel for my years of misplaced anger. That close.
Between the Camel incident, the countless awful coffee shop signs and business cards emblazoned with it, and the fact that THIS kid was a supporter, my hatred was eternally sealed. I would hate the Papyrus font for the rest of my natural born life, and anything written in it would immediately be translated to “This (book/movie/album/organic cous-cous) was created by a Zwan-loving asshole”.
Or so I thought…
Lets switch gears here for a second. I’ve covered “Things I Despise”, now lets swing to the other end of the spectrum. If you were to ask me, at any age (from age 8-27), what my favorite film of all time was, my answer would be invariably ALIENS. On an off-day, it would be Predator, but for 364 days out of every year of my life, Aliens has been my favorite movie. It’s near perfect in its pacing, characterization, script, story, production design, cinematography blah blah blah. Simply put, it rules. Next to Robocop, I think it is one of the greatest action movies of all time, and I will never bump it from my number one spot. I could go on for hours, but I will spare you.
A little bit further down the list of Awesome Movies I Will Quit Work to Watch on TBS is Terminator 2. Its SUPER Blockbuster-y, but not because it cheaply plays on our desires to watch stuff blow up, but because it tackles big subjects like time-travel, the end of the world, our perceptions of the word “villain” and comes out at the end with only the tiniest bit of cheese dripping from it. Then there is the first Terminator, which is way darker and grainier than you remember. In terms of tone, its the better movie.
Anyway, amateur film analysis should be written in the papyrus font, so I will cool it for a second. But, to make the connection, all of these films were created by James Cameron. James Cameron has made some great fucking movies. Aliens, Terminator (1 and 2), The Abyss, even Titanic has its place. Now, he’s coming out with Avatar.
And what is that font at the end of the trailer? BOOM! PAPYRUS! JAMES CAMERON JUST KICKED THE WORLD IN THE FACE WITH A SIX BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE (“he spent our entire economic stimulus package on Avatar” – Ogre) WITH A SIX DOLLAR MICROSOFT WORD DEFAULT FONT. What is this? Is Avatar a movie or a vegetarian three bean cruelty free lentil chili?
Fuck you James Cameron. You’ve thrown me into the greatest crisis of my life on earth. To date.
I can’t lie. This movie (though the script and plot was obviously written entirely in the Papyrus font as well) looks awesome. I’m being straight up, drunk-honest here, the trailer gave me chills, especially when the word “ALIENS” came on the screen. The graphics look sick, the action looks almost too big to comprehend, and no matter how much James Cameron is insulting my intelligence by carelessly packaging his own sentiments about The War into a blue-skinned propaganda film, I will still be seeing this movie. Probably more than once. Which brought me to an equation, the mathematical equation at the core of my being that, once solved, will be the agent of my undoing (like a Dan Brown novel, only gay-er and more pointless).
My Love for James Cameron Movies > My Hatred for the Papyrus Font
But not by much.
With that said. Fuck you James Cameron, you could have picked a better font. Also, fuck you, guy who invented the papyrus font, because you brought me to this place. I have now transferred all of my hatred to you sir. Whoever you are, because you allowed your faux-egyptian bullshit font to infect the mind of a decent man like James Cameron, whom I have sworn allegiance to for most of my life (even if I haven’t seen Dark Angel), I am making it my life’s goal to find you and kill you. You can have ZEvan, you can have all of the horrible wedding invitations and sweet-corn-exfoliating scrubs in the world, but shame on you for taking James Cameron. You better be a dead pharaoh or something buried in a pyramid or something. Actually even if you are, I will find you, dig you up and fuck you up all over again.
Fuck you. That is all.
Tags: aliens, avatar, james cameron, papyrus font
I love you.
I love the rant. Love your face.
The bad news is that the “Avatar” logo font is not Papyrus. It is a custom hand-drawn font that unfortunately looks like Papyrus.
I hate Papyrus and the Avatar logo does look enough like Papyrus to suck just as much.
god damnit thats even worse! so James Cameron walked into the design wing of the space station he had built (in space), showed them his Family Home Evening board, slapped down $400,000 and said “Make Me Something Like This”?
This just gets worse and worse.
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OOOOOOOOOH! AM I IN ANCIENT EGYPT? Because I see a faux-antiquated, boringly-distressed font everywhere!
Dear fucking lord I could not agree with you more, brother. That font makes my skin crawl at a rate reminiscent of Comic Sans and Copperplate. It finds its way into every slightly ‘exotic’ place it can like a cancer that feeds on Jimmy Buffet fans and people who know what the fuck an essential oil is.
Mr. Cameron is indeed a genius. He wrote my favorite underrated action movie of all time (and one of my top 10 favorite movies of all time): Strange Days. Here is a movie full of visceral scenes of first-person brutality and terror, mixed in with a DISTURBINGLY accurate vision of the then-near future. I remember watching that movie in 1995 and thinking “No way everyone is going to have cell phones and widescreen televisions and minidisc players that record thoughts any time soon.” Ok, so one of those didn’t really come to pass, but give Science™ a year or two…
The old radio station (if you can call a webcast-only-supplemented-by-shows-on-a-low-power-station-run-by-a-man-who-thinks-he’s-a-goddam-werewolf a radio station) was indeed a den of lost souls, and I happily include myself. Trying to get more than 5 people to listen to my cavalcade of techno and house music in rural Wisconsin was obviously a form of self-torture. But there were a few kids on there with their hearts in the right places, trying to bring the good news of Nile and Lamb of God to the masses.
That said, didn’t Nile use Papyrus on their album covers?
Kathryn Bigelow!! She made Strange Days, and was married to Cameron. She also made Point Break, and fucking Near Dark (Vampire movie that never says the word “vampire” with the entire cast of Aliens, and the most brutal scene ever…where Bill Paxton fucks up a guy using his boot spurs), and that movie The Hurt Locker also looks awesome… so even his wife is cool by proxy. Though most of that is her own talent…anyway.
And yes, definitely a band of mutants with their hearts in the right place. I actually think you nailed it, both Nile AND Lamb of God use the Papyrus font in their art. Say it ain’t so.
Dusty was awesome. Corey was cool too, despite his date-rapist facial hair.
Anyway, still, fuck the papyrus font. Thanks for the comment sir west.
You just hate Papyrus because it makes your last name display as WAMberg!
Warnberg
BAHAHAHA. Us Warnbergs have been fighing the Wambergs for centuries. They can take our land, but they’ll never take our freedom!
Here, here~!
ALLL hell has broken loose. I hate the font as much as you. I have found the guy. He is still alive. http://www.costelloart.com/ If you need help finding what he looks like to kill him, http://www.notesondesign.net/images/authors/chris_costello.jpg and he lives somewhere in Boston, Massachusetts. Here’s more fonts you can hate while you are at it. http://new.myfonts.com/person/Chris_Costello/
I think this might be where he lives.
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=Chris%20Costello%20%2B%22Boston%2C%20Massachusetts%22&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl
American Dad had Papyrus on last night (Rapture’s Delight). Shame on you Seth MacFarlane, shame on you!
Nile doesn’t use Papyrus – it’s something similar but probably a custom hand-drawn font.
Lamb of God does use Papyrus, because they suck and have always sucked.
Entombed’s “Left Hand Path” album cover used Papyrus.
Fuck Papyrus.
I was also going to point out that the Avatar logo isn’t actually papyrus but then I did a side by side comparison and it is actually taken directly from Papyrus. They added some hook serifs and broke the As up to give them variety. But if you look at the notches in the letters they all come directly from Papyrus.
It’s actually a rather brilliant derivation on a horrible font. If papyrus had those serifs and didn’t have those ridiculous ascenders I might actually like it. And if it looked good morons wouldn’t use it and would probably stick to comic-sans.
Wow, I appreciate you doing the due dilligence here. Your research has helped to galvanize my hatred. You deserve a medal. And to Chris Martin, you are one resourceful bastard. Its good to know there is a legion of people out there who hate this bullshit as much as I do. And Joey, I thought Lamb of God sucked too, until I went to one of their shows and got my ass kicked by 200 mountain dew fueled 17 year olds. Still, papyrus font.
It looks like Chris Costello has a day job as a creative at Coldwell Banker. Let’s hope he doesn’t get promoted to head up the real estate sign department. Papyrus might be the new font of foreclosure!
I don’t understand, since we all know that Obama used $7 billion of the stimulus package to pay for this movie, why wouldn’t they also create a new font to stimulate additional sales in the aftermarket?
Then again, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t use the $7 billion to create mutants, a new planet, and those cool looking flying machines instead of using CGI. I think they probably could have done all that with the $7 billion and still had enough leftover to pay me to draw the word Avatar on a clear overhead projector sheet to use for the title screen.
Not only does the font look EXACTLY like Papyrus, it’s clearly based on it too. Look how the contours of the V follow the jagged edges of Papyrus perfectly:
http://adambalsam.com/papyrus-really#papyrus
Is this one any better?
http://joe-shields.com/Joeshields/randoms/avatarcomicsans.jpg
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. Now it looks like a dreamworks kids movie…or..ferngully
i could not agree more. i mean, this is literally my favorite movie of all time, it cost like 20 billion dollars, and they slap the oh-so rugged, extremely anti-war, wanna-be hippie, au-naturel font that should be used for the cover of a 6th grader’s early-humans research report, an “I LOVE WHALES” bumper sticker, or the ink-jet-printed cover of an illegally copied movie for “THE GOLDEN COMPASS” at a movie store on the last scene of the movie in flourescent green letters (by the way a why is that green? i mean the whole theme of the movie is blue, isn’t it?!) They could at least spend an extra 2,000 dollars coming up with an original font.
Looking, at the poster, I believe it’s time to put a ban on Trajan too. This is a widely overused font in the movie business.
Apart from that, your article rocked. I watched in awe as the ugly Papyrus-like fonts appeared on the screen. Actually, for the sake of seeing this font on the movie poster, I wouldn’t have gone to watch it if I hadn’t been invited to it.
P.S. ERS: 2000$ for an original font? Add a zero and we can start working