I’m struggling to understand the terminology you’re using here. How are you defining ‘font’ v ‘typeface’ (and yes, I do know the difference - I have a degree in typography - I just don’t understand the definitions you’re alluding to here).
As to the ‘bad font’ debate, I forget who said it now, but a famous designer once said ‘there’s no such thing as a bad font, only a bad use of that font’ or words to that effect.
I think that’s bollocks - fonts can most certainly be terrible examples of design in themselves.
No, the worst font ever has to be that fucking Calibri (not our jackboot of a similar sounding name.) What dumbshit A**** B**** C**** D**** E**** F**** …<& many other non-polite words> asshole at Microsquash decided that this should be the MFing default???
Worst is you can’t even get rid of it if you try; it lurks around & returns when you don’t want it, just like a STfuckingD!
(I have two spreadsheets, both using Arial; cut & paste from one to the other; why the eff does it show up in that veryhardtoread POS font when pasted?) Fuckyouverymuch, Bill Gates…& Obama, too!
The discussions above appear (at least to me) to be confusing the headline of the web page – Dreamcast VMU Icons – and the pseudo-Asian characters below the headline.
That Dreamcast VMU Icons headline is just plain wrong. It’s an ugly and inappropriate font to begin with and it’s made worse by the use of drop shadow.
The pseudo-Asian characters – Japanese Kanji mixed with hiragana but made to (poorly) mimic the old digital characters on an IBM green-screen terminal – remind me of something I would expect to see on FireFly – maybe on a ship’s dashboard in the post-Terran exodus universe in which Chinese, English, and a few other languages eventually became mixed and hybridized during multi-year interstellar voyages. In fact it occurs to me that those characters might have been used in the DVD Extras section of Serenity where you could select a planet and read about its culture and the episode that takes place there. [Or maybe not; I’m at work so I don’t have access to the DVD to explore it right now.]
And, of course, they mean nothing in Japanese; they’re actually misused approximations of Western alphabet characters – Menu, About, Contact, Custom Icons, Forum, Tools, VMU Icons with (for instance) the hiragana character for su used instead of a lower-case T and the Chinese/Kanji character for te (hand) used instead of an upper-case F. [That might also have been the way they were used on that DVD I can’t currently access.]
Okay, here is a very specific reason why the font used for the menu is bad. It appears that one of the drop-down menus is “Tool’s”, which makes the designer seem illiterate. But if you consider the font carefully, it is far from clear that the line to the upper right of the L is an apostrophe. There are no other Ls in the text sample so it is hard to be sure, but look at the letter U. It has a similar added line, which is evidently there to make the font look more like Chinese characters.
It suggests that writing anything in this font that required quotation marks or apostrophes would probably be a mess.
If you are an editor, printer, layout artist, or typesetter, or retired before Microsoft Word came out, we are talking about a “typeface.” If you are everybody else then we are talking about a font.