I was looking at the card of an acquaintance today, where her contact info was set in a font called Trajan. I thought to myself, “My God. There it is again. Trajan.” It is, literally, everywhere. It’s even used on our new logo at work:
And I thought Neutraface was overused! Trajan has it beat, for sure. I love Neutraface. Love it. And yet, now that every ad agency and design studio is using it for just about everything, I’m getting tired of it. Trajan, which is a caps-only font, is elegant in its own way, but it has been overused for years. Yet no one’s picking up on how overused it is. Oh, except this guy:
I think I can blame a few things for this kind of font overuse. One is designers who don’t know what they are doing. These are the people who use the fonts that come with Windows, don’t know that “The 90’s” is wrong (it should be “The ’90s”), and can’t kern to save the planet. Another is designers who do know what they’re doing, but have to design for people who are blind to anything new or creative. “I love that new font Wendy’s is using! Can we use that?” Worse of all is a combination of the two: clueless designer and clueless client.
The Wren Forum » Vote for Obama Sans! Expounded Thusly:
[…] The cheer! The optimism! The Optima! (And the Gill Sans and the Myriad and the Futura and the Trajan and… ACK!) If John McCain were an investment firm, this would be a great website design. […]
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