Take a look at the font this guy uses on the menu at the top of the page. It is designed to resemble Chinese characters and does it so well they are almost as hard to read as Chinese characters. It’s a tutorial on changing icons:
http://robertdalesmith.com/dcvmuicons/tutorial2.htm
Dennis
It’s bad, but better than wingdings.
It is not a bad font. When people say a font is bad, usually what they really mean is:
It is overused. Which is ironic, because playing up the hate for certain fonts has itself been overdone.
It is used improperly. Some fonts are meant for inline text, some are optimized for screen use, some for headines, some are thematic or artistic.
Your font is a thematic font. It would be fine in a logo or poster. It doesn’t work as menu buttons, but that is the fault of the placement, not the font.
Fonts that are legitimately bad would be ones with poor kerning, such that the spacing between letters looks off.
This one is illegible though, doesn’t that make it a bad font?
I have to disagree. It would be fine in a logo or poster only if you meant your logo or poster to be ugly and illegible.
So the only basis on which to evaluate the quality of a font is the kerning? All correctly kerned fonts are equally good?
Heck, that could qualify as Worst Site, even for ancient Geocity standards.
I’m not sure why you think it is ugly, so I can’t comment on that.
Legibility again, is an issue of placement. Judging a style for legibility when it’s purpose is artistic is sort of like judging a costume mask because you can’t tell who is wearing it. Also, while it would be annoying to read it in a wall of text, it’s not like you can’t tell what it says.
As far as kerning, that was just poor wording on my part. I meant it as an example of a legitimate reason to judge a font.
This generally strikes me as blaming the cars rather than the drivers, after seeing a race car at the PTA and an SUV at the track.
It looks like mock Japanese, and to me, if I can’t make out what I’m reading instantaneously, that automatically makes it a bad font (also, is what we’re really talking about the “typeface”? Not being pedantic; just asking).
I still can’t quite read the words at the top of the website “Dream??? VM? Icons”.
If I can’t figure out the letters, and I am supposed to be able to, then I would say it has failed pretty badly as a font.
Dreamcast VMU Icons. I think. The drop shadow he’s added really isn’t doing us any favours.
I think this is more like judging a mask because it looks like a plate of reheated corned beef hash when the costume is supposed to be Marilyn Monroe.
My understanding is that there are supposed to be two types of fonts (I don’t recall the proper terms for them offhand). Some fonts are intended to be used for text, where people are going to be reading large amounts of words in the font. Other fonts are designed for things like titles and logos, where readability isn’t as big an issue and you can have a more artistic effect.
So sometimes the problem with a font isn’t the font itself but that people are misusing it.
The heading font is different than the “mock Japanese” menu font, I believe. It’s also ugly, and rendered even more illegible by the poor use of drop shadow.
The SDMB doesn’t give us very many truly awful choices for fonts, which is a bit of a tragedy in and of itself.
No, legibility is not just a matter of placement. It’s a matter of the ease of being able to interpret the characters as letters. And this font appears to make that deliberately difficult. I actually couldn’t tell what it said initially, until I looked down at the text below it. I’m sure I could have parsed the letters eventually with some effort, but that does make it a bad font. You can have artistic fonts that are perfectly legible.
Can you give me an example of the kind of application where this font would be appropriate? Perhaps a sign on a goth teenager’s bedroom door saying “Keep out”?
Nah. A goth teenager would want that to be legible.
j
Tell me, do you find it an attractive font?
No, it’s a lot more like seeing a Yugo or a Pontiac Aztec anywhere. A race car or an SUV are well designed for their purpose. Some cars are simply badly designed for any purpose.
Yeah, the header is definitely graffiti styled, not pseudo-Asian…which is another issue - the header and menu should be at least stylistically related.
Well, I don’t think either font is “the worst font ever” Try browsing dafont.com sometime.
The menu font may or may not be bad in another context, but the font choice is execrable for this page.
IMO, fonts can be roughly divided into functional and decorative. The font used for the menu is definitely a decorative font. Decorative fonts should never be used for functional items like menus or for large blocks of text - only in places where there are just a few words. And they should always be very large words. Movie posters and books are good places for decorative fonts. The font choice is as much about giving a feeling about the movie/book as being readable, for instance Blade Runner, or the Harry Potter franchise. The latter, especially, would be unreadable in anything smaller than 36 point.
Is it an ugly font? Who knows? It’s got too much detail for the size of the font, so you can’t tell if it would look nice at a better size, or just messy.
Note, the font for the header is a graffiti font. These come from people who are spray painting railroad cars and abandoned walls. They are not meant to be readable at all, which makes their use for something that is meant to be readable as an even worse idea than the menu font. Adding a drop shadow to a font that’s supposed to be something spray painted on the “wall” is adding insult to injury.
I meant, the relative importance of legibility is dependent on context. You seem to be judging the font at least partly based on its use. Probably anything put on that page would look ugly by association. While that font definitely doesn’t work there, it is far from the worst design flaw.
I’m confused by your association of goth with Kanji. Are you having genre issues?
This could easily work for a cyberpunk or bladerunner sort of aesthetic.
But again, if you’re judging a font based on it’s usefulness as a typeface, you’ve just created a strawman.