Patchwork Psychology

Not long after I began in web development back in the mid ’90s, I began to favor fonts without serifs. I found the smooth curves and unadulterated corners of sans-serif fonts to be much more cuddly than their barbed-wire formed cousins. Perhaps I liked crispness of a clean sans-serif font on a minimalist white background or maybe I was just repulsed by the “defaultness” of serif fonts.

Whatever the case, I grew to liking them. However, I hadn’t really had much for long blocks of text on anything that I had designed. Now that blogs are in vogue, I’m feeling a growing emptiness in Verdana. It can’t quite do my blocks of text justice like Georgia can. What was once clean without serifs is now twice as clean with ‘em, plus it is easier to read.

The change of heart is probably due in part to changes in the web design industry. As the nerds who made text-only webpages gradually adopted more graphical practices and average joes began using website-in-a-box utilities with themes made by professional designers, the “default” font face started to lose its serifs. Remember those great FrontPage themes with the hover-over java applet buttons? I’m sure something like Arial was the default face for that theme.

Now that blogs are making it big and seem to be the textual outlet for everybody and their brother (I mean, shoot, I have a blog), maybe serifs will start to scratch my eyes again. But right now, they are clean and sexy.

All in all, my point is this: I needed a few paragraphs to put before this link to an informative website about sans-serif fonts.

creativepro.com: Not Your Fathers Sans Serif
Some enlightening history and information on popular sans-serif fonts.
http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/17185.html

Here’s a good page from the same site about font trends.

creativepro.com: Trends in Type
A good amount of information about the font zeitgeist.
http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/17399.html