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(transcript from hrwiki.org)
Where have you been? I was getting sick of that back in 1980.
Gratuitous use of the @ sign.
In the Buffalo and Cleveland areas, Brush Script is ubiquitous; it’s the official font for what seems like too many businesses, much like Gill Sans is everywhere in London. Seriously, I’ve never seen Brush Script used so much before.
Lithos and Neuland are commonly used in an African-American context, such as book covers and advertising marketed at African-Americans.
You mean Gr@uitous?
This one might get me scorned.
Lorem Ipsum.
I understand what it is and what it’s for (I even just used it myself to test a page layout). But seeing it everywhere grates on my nerves.
I was stuck behind a van this morning (belonging to a bathroom fitting firm) that had the company name in Algerian (cliche no 1), then the slogan below in Brush Script (cliche no 2), then the phone numbers in Comic Sans. 
Perhaps there’s a vinyl lettering firm somewhere in the East End offering bulk discounts for butt-ugly font collections.
I don’t know about you, but we refuse to pander to this sort of nonsense. If the PRs press the matter, we gently inform them that hundreds of years of English usage takes precedence over one internet start-up’s pretentiousness. :rolleyes:
Even worse are initial/endcaps, like ThiS, but top-aligned, like an old western “WanteD” poster.
I think it’s just that the vinyl lettering is CNC cut using a machine driven by a PC - layouts are either provided by the client (in a variety of formats, including, I believe, Powerpoint) or are done by the operator (who knows how to work the machine, but may have no formal design training or skills)
There’s no barrier to prevent the most inept content creator realising their design in vinyl.
OK, this isn’t necessarily a cliché, but this is my #1 peeve:
Using a foot mark instead of an apostrophe, especially in a possessive case. I’m sure this is from amateurs using design software. But I have to wonder: why is the default on a keyboard a foot mark and an inch mark? Why not have the defaults be an apostrophe and quote marks? Probably 99% of keyboard users use apostrophes and quotes all the time and only rarely - if ever - use foot marks and inch marks.
Yes, I’m an art director/graphic designer, and all of these things mentioned bug me.
You mean ’ and " ?
I think it probably goes all the way back to the basic ASCII character set - where there was not the room for lots of subtly different characters, and the rendering to screen wasn’t elegant enough to require it.
Magnetout: Yes that’s what I’m referring to. It’s very prevalent on signs for restaurants and such… a place called Nancy’s using a vertical foot mark where an apostrophe should be used.
In an email or board post I don’t care. When it’s someone’s business sign that I’d assume they’d have pride in (and presumably paid a bad graphic designer to execute), it irritates me.
Pranky – I guess seeing a seafood restaurant named “Jim’s Fo’c’s’le” would just about have you shooting up the local grammar school.
ChiefScott- I’m a peaceful guy. But it would bug me quite a bit, and likely I wouldn’t eat there.
I’ve always like Papyrus, but I knew it had jumped the shark when I recognized its use in a housing development sign.
I’m with Pranky. We’ve moved beyond simple encoding schemes like ASCII and Latin-1 and computers can use UTF-8 now. Our horizons include writing systems like the curvilinear Oriya and the geometric Inuktitut syllabics and many other beautiful scripts. There’s no reason to limit ourselves to ‘standard’ glyphs when we can have correct ones.
(Typed using Linux with the compose key, since we’ll likely never have HTML character entities here again, damn them all to the lowest stygian pits of inky Hell to be pressed with hot type by maniacal printer’s devils!)
Another thing that’s kind of annoying - and, it seems,
a favourite technique of advertising copywriters - is the
use of blocks of text consisting of a stream of copy about
the product, with (and here’s the clever bit) certainseemingly
random words picked out and highlighted in order to
cunningly spell out another, more concise, sentence.
Yes it was clever at first, but not any more. Please, for the love of God,
make it stop. Now.
It usually means the text was pasted from an e-mail and nobody noticed.
It’s not so much a “cliché” as an “error,” but I hate it when quotation marks are used for “emphasis” in signage.
Awesome post. I am ashamed to say I never got that there is a double message in those ads until just now.
Excellent, Colophon!
Actually, in a somewhat similar vein, i hate reading blog entries and other online texts where every second or third word is a link to another website or entry. All that hyperlinking is extremely distracting and annoying.