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Yep, I created the new Avatar font
- mark-r 4y agoI loved the link to the SNL skit. Agree it's a fantastic performance by Ryan Gosling. The funniest part for me though is how it ended with Comic Sans, the only font in the universe more reviled than Papyrus.
- bmitc 4y agoI think overused came before and caused reviled.
- mark-r 4y agoThere's definitely a connection between overused and reviled, but I don't think one causes the other. Do people hate on Trajan for example?
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoHobo is pretty reviled too.
- froh 4y agoAs I had to search for the SNL avatar papyrus thing here it is: https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ
- status200 4y agoIt is also embedded in the article.
- jeppesen-io 4y agoOne of my favorite shorts from SNL
- raisedbyninjas 4y agoSNL should put it in a preshow ad of Avatar 2 screenings.
- danrocks 4y agoYou are doing God's work. This to me is one of the funniest SNL sketches ever.
- amelius 4y agoAnyone else having "font fatigue"? I just can't tell whether a font is new or not. They all look like they came from some standard stock library that everybody already uses.
- barkingcat 4y agoThat's not font fatigue. That means the font designers did their job. You're not supposed to be able to tell if a font is new or not (unless you work as a typographer or graphics designer) You should ask yourself: is the text legible, does it make reading easier? Does it add a bit of visual interest or flatten visual interest (ie fades into the background) depending on what the design calls for? Those are the important questions. As to whether a font is new or not, if you are a typographer, then that is your bread and butter. I had a friend who's a typographer and they would be able to point out all the ways Helvetica is different from Helvetica Neue (and talk about it for hours and days on end), for example: https://creativepro.com/helvetica-vs-neue-helvetica-same-but-different/ https://creativepro.com/helvetica-vs-neue-helvetica-same-but...
- christkv 4y agoLol I love the following line from that sketch > He just highlighted Avatar, he clicked the drop down menu and then he randomly selected Papyrus. Like a thoughtless child just wandering by a garden yanking leaves along the way.
- behnamoh 4y agoThat's what most people do with their PowerPoint slides and Word documents. I can totally relate with Ryan Gosling in the clip.
- paxys 4y ago"I don't even think this is Papyrus. They clearly modified it." "Whatever they did, it wasn't enough!"
- supertofu 4y agoGod bless Julio Torres. One of my favorite SNL sketches of all time. That and "Fischer Price Wells for Sensitive Boys" -- another Julio Torres sketch!
- evan_ 4y agoCheck out his HBO show Los Espookys. It's really good and fully lives in the surreal dream logic world of those sketches.
- sydthrowaway 4y agoPapyrus is the top SNL skit of all time. The next one is Grouch (Sesame street x Joker parody). What would be #3?
- CharlesW 4y agoHaunted Elevator (ft. David S. Pumpkins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS00xWnqwvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS00xWnqwvI
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoAgreed Papyrus is top 3, I might quibble over the grouch because I think either the crime scene skit or the coroner skit might take 2 and 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo6CyNNC60M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo6CyNNC60M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjS8cA2Jfzc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjS8cA2Jfzc
- yboris 4y agoPapyrus skit direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
- 4y ago
- _ddzr 4y agoObligatory: “I know what you did!”
- sydthrowaway 4y agoI love how the designer seems evil
- behnamoh 4y agoI love the meme scene where Ryan is driving and keeps eye contact with the designer!
- oldstrangers 4y agoI just keep calling it Papyrus Black. A definite improvement though.
- behnamoh 4y agoI have the same feeling about Calibri. When someone just picks whatever font came with MS Word/PowerPoint, it just makes me judge all the other decisions that they made in the project. Maybe it's just me, but it genuinely disgusts me to see Calibri because it's not crispt and has some of the worst curvatures I've seen on a font.
- alx__ 4y agoIt's the default typeface for Office products since the 2007 release. So they just didn't pick anything better
- behnamoh 4y agoI heard it's going to change in the next release (or maybe it did already).
- Bellyache5 4y agoCalibri was part of a family of "C" fonts released together as the ClearType Font Collection. - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/cleartype/clear-type-font-collection https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/cleartype/clear-... - https://typographica.org/on-typography/microsofts-cleartype-font-collection-a-fair-and-balanced-review/ https://typographica.org/on-typography/microsofts-cleartype-...
- BugsJustFindMe 4y ago
- behnamoh 4y agoI know... I'm trying to be more accepting and not get irritated by such things. It may sound silly to get annoyed by a font, but the perfectionist inside of me just can't accept picking the most available font. I actually spend a lot of time choosing/researching fonts for my slides and documents.
- 4y ago
- tadfisher 4y agoTribal, yet futuristic. Love it!
- jonny_eh 4y agoPapyrus 2.0 Looks nice!
- gkoberger 4y agoA lot of times, the issue isn't the font... it's ubiquity and misuse. Comic Sans, for example, was literally for speech bubbles for a comic book dog. Papyrus was created by a 23 year old who was reading the Bible and wanted to translate the feel to a computer.
- Hamuko 4y agoPapyrus also makes for a dogshit font for legible subtitles.
- kevinmchugh 4y agoComic Sans might have a better reputation if its lower-case was just smaller upper-case, as Dave Gibbons does.
- munificent 4y agoThe problem with Comic Sans is that it was a originally a pixel font designed to look good un-antialiased at a specific pixel size. When that was expanded to a vector font, the resulting proportions looked really horrific at other sizes. Like taking an old 16x16 NES Super Mario Bros sprite, scaling it up to 4K and expecting it to look like an attractive portrait of an Italian plumber.
- Thorrez 4y ago>Comic Sans, for example, was literally for speech bubbles for a comic book dog. Comic book? I'm not sure if that's accurate terminology. It was a cartoon dog in the Microsoft Bob software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
- Kaibeezy 4y agoComic Papyrus - https://creativemarket.com/blog/designer-combines-papyrus-and-comic-sans-the-end-is-near https://creativemarket.com/blog/designer-combines-papyrus-an...
- imwillofficial 4y agoThat video was awesome, and this article was a great read. I would like a deeper dive on your choices, this is an interesting topic.
- ChrisArchitect 4y ago(2020)
- everyone 4y agoThose aged/distressed fonts with little nicks / chunks missing / broken bits, look fine until there are two or more of the same letter in a sentence. Then I cant help but notice that the same letters are aged/distressed in exactly the same way.. It seems like a really obvious issue that clearly undermines the effect they are going for.
- xoa 4y agoAgreed, that's definitely the big glaring issue to me too. Normally all letters being identical is a good expected thing, but for an aged look it falls flat because aging doesn't uniformly affect every single letter across pages and books of course. And our brains are pretty good at doing pattern recognition/outline shape comparison with stuff that is side-by-side, so once you notice it niggles a bit. Now that I think about it that seems like a product which should exist, be it standalone or as a plug-in, where "aging" could be soft-applied (not talking rasterizing the text then applying filters to the pixels themselves) to any arbitrary string of text either with a certain amount of random noise or via algorithms that would simulate various kinds of environmental effects on stone/wood/papyrus/vellum/paper. It's almost certainly not worth having that kind of complexity in fonts/typesetting engines themselves though the typegeek in me thinks it'd be pretty dang fun.
- capitainenemo 4y agoI've seen a ton of fonts out there abuse ligatures (Chartwell, Bullshit Sans). I wonder if something like that could be done for pseudorandomness... use a different texture depending on the text on either side.
- capableweb 4y agoYou could in theory do just that, but the amount of work to achieve that would be staggering, automated or not. What we really need in this world is procedural/generated-on-the-fly fonts, where you setup how the font is suppose to react to X and then use that.
- kixiQu 4y agoI use a "textured" font on my website (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IM+Fell+English https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IM+Fell+English, see https://maya.land https://maya.land) and it bothers me all the time that the deformations repeat across letters -- like cracked stone ones where the cracks are the same on every "a"? Because I think mine's simple enough, eventually I'm going to figure out how to get a similar effect with an SVG filter like the "xerox" one on https://endtimes.dev/ https://endtimes.dev/.
- ricardobeat 4y agoCharacter alternates have been a feature in OpenType for a while. They can be triggered contextually or manually with CSS. Usually these and ligatures are enough to create natural-looking variations.
- Dangeranger 4y agoDo you know fonts that feature character alternates prominently? I cannot think of type that I've seen used which used variations on characters to lead to the appearance of natural looking hand written text.
- chipotle_coyote 4y agoThe most (in)famous font that's chock-full of character alternates is Zapfino. Whether it'll look naturally hand-written is up for debate -- once you recognize Zapfino, you're going to recognize Zapfino -- but you can get some pretty expressive variants. The downside of recognizing Zapfino is always being permanently disappointed in how few people actually take advantage of those alternates, though. You'll sometimes find them in other fonts, though; Hoefler Text's italics have a whole bunch of "swash" alternates, for instance, which can be a lot of fun for titles. (Both Zapfino and Hoefler Text are standard fonts on macOS.)
- ricardobeat 4y agoI found this one recently: https://ifonts.xyz/mythshire-font.html https://ifonts.xyz/mythshire-font.html Note how in the 'Dungeons & Dragons' example none of the repeated characters look alike. It only uses ligatures though, not contextual alternates, so words like 'egg' will still look mechanical.
- no-dr-onboard 4y agoThe body text font for this blog post is hard to read. I can't tell if that's ironic or not.
- capableweb 4y agoSans-serif is typically not a very good fit for body texts. The line-height is also set too low, makes it harder to jump to the next line as you try to find which one it is.
- bdlowery 4y agoA Sans-serif font is totally fine for body copy.
- contravariant 4y agoSeems ironic to read this in a sans-serif font. The font of this article is bloody awful though, I'll agree with you on that.
- runarberg 4y agoI’m curious where you heard that sans-serifs are not a good fit for body text. Sans-serifs has been a popular choice for body text on posters, backcovers (of books, albums, board-games etc.), user interfaces, instruction pamphlets, social media, blog pages, etc. I honestly have no idea where a recommendation such as this could originate from.
- chipotle_coyote 4y ago"Don't use sans-serif typefaces for body text" has been age-old advice in the print world, on the principle that long blocks of text -- e.g., not posters, back covers, or instruction pamphlets, but short stories, novels, feature stories, newspaper and magazine articles -- is easier to read with serif type. In the print world, long-form text like that is overwhelmingly set in serif faces, not sans-serif. Sans-serif type became the standard in on-screen computer contexts in no small part because at 75–100 PPI resolution, monitors just couldn't render delicate features particularly well; even good anti-aliasing is going to turn the serifs on 12-point text into gray smudges. Computers just did better when you went to sans-serif fonts, particularly ones designed with relatively high x-heights and big counters like Verdana.
- lupire 4y agoThat web page font is so harsh on my eyes, hard to read. Also, "tribal" is a weird choice of word. What is the intended meaning?
- andybak 4y agoIt's weird that you find it weird. The meaning seems obvious to me (despite being incredibly inaccurate, western-centric and mildly patronising) I would say it means "evocative of cultures that are stereotypically thought to be tribal in the colloquial sense of the word"
- dmitriid 4y agoGiven all the care that went into Avatar: the languages, the culture, the visuals, it's absolutely baffling how careless Cameron was about two things: - the font - and, most importantly, the music: Creating the Music of the Na’vi in James Cameron’s Avatar: An Ethnomusicologist’s Role, https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/piece/583 https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/pie... from one of the people who tried to create a truly unique music for Avatar. And then simply rejected by Cameron. Why Avatar has the Most Ironic Soundtrack of All Time by Sideways, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL5sX8VmvB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL5sX8VmvB8
- certifiedloud 4y agoAnd the story.
- dandigangi 4y agoHeh, got scared it was going to be Papyrus
- berkeleyjunk 4y agoI really got excited and thought this was about the other (IMHO better) Avatar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender But this font looks cool too.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoI think it's basically everyone's opinion that watched both, which is why 10 Years Later, 'Avatar' Is the Most Popular Movie No One Remembers https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjw4bv/10-years-later-avatar-is-the-most-popular-movie-no-one-remembers https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjw4bv/10-years-later-avatar... which obviously is not completely true, as evidenced by this post, but one thing I have noticed is that whenever anyone mentions the movie Avatar someone always comes in and says I got excited because I thought we were talking about the other one, but whenever anyone mentions the other one nobody gives a damn about the movie. on edit: I guess 13 years later, but who cares, it's Avatar the movie.
- iroh2727 4y agoYeah honestly I only remember Avatar the movie because of the SNL Papyrus skit mentioned in this article lol. Possibly superior to the movie. But who knows, maybe Avatar 2 with its new font will be better... I mean, I do like the ideas and messages Avatar the movie was going for, but perhaps it was too visual for me. The experience of watching in theater was great/dazzling but nothing really stuck with me.
- schroeding 4y agoReminds me of this video: Can you name a character from Avatar? https://youtu.be/kxp1IBK1OPI?t=6 https://youtu.be/kxp1IBK1OPI?t=6
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoI would have actually pass that test, I can name Colonel Quaritch, Jake Sully, Ripley and Eiwa (I think it counts as a character).
- gitpusher 4y agoLooks great. Although it could really use a "tt" ligature. Just look at the names "Scott" and "Letteri" and you'll see what I mean
- evantahler 4y agoPeople like this font https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
- sporkland 4y agoI wish they had secretly released the font and got it widely adopted a year or so ahead, to ensure we could get a second SNL skit.
- EricHolden12 4y ago
- mikl 4y agoYou monster (j/k). Nice font work. I’ll be greatly surprised if the Avatar sequels gain anything like the popularity the first movie had, but at least it won’t be because they used Papyrus.
- yumraj 4y agoThe Papyrus skit is funny, but am unclear is there an issue with using Papyrus? Is Papyrus not a good font? I'm not getting it. In other words why was the skit made?
- DHPersonal 4y agoIt’s an overused and often misused font, similar to how Trajan went from Rome-based works to being used on most dramatic and thriller film posters in the early 2000s.
- hnbad 4y agoPapyrus is so widely used it's comparable to Comic Sans for many designers. It's not a bad font (even less so than Comic Sans) but it's overused and thus comes off as "amateurish". The skit names hookah bars, Shakira merchandise and off-brand tea because these are not only things that actually often use the font but also aren't considered examples of great design. This is contrasted with Avatar being a massive blockbuster movie with a huge production budget and arguably one of the most successful movies of its time. As the article states, the font isn't really a terrible choice for the movie but because it's so "basic" it comes across as low effort compared to the overall production value of the movie itself. You could argue that it's elitism but at least in part it's played for laughs because it's such an irrelevant detail while also being so potentially infuriating to those who actually do that kind of thing for a living. Realistically most professionals likely just rolled their eyes when they saw it used Papyrus or had a good laugh, but it's fun to exaggerate this to such dramatic proportions because it mixes a grain of truth (the font choice feels cheap) into an escalation of dramatic stakes (the protagonist losing sleep, obsessing over the typeface, stalking the designer, and finally crashing his car and yelling at him from the street) and the final pay-off (the designer smugly looking at him, implying the protagonist was right about the font choice being an evil act that the designer "got away with").
- lastdong 4y agoStory is not very original, dull even, lots of clichés. True story, the person sitting next to me in the cinema fell asleep, well I almost did too. I really didn’t get all the hype around it. After re-watching it, some scenes are nonetheless great. 3D was ok, but if I remember correctly mostly a window into the world and not many scenes where the elements jump out of the screen into the our side of the room. Released around the same time, A Christmas Carol was a great film in that regard - spectacular 3D experience. Edit: The font looks great, really liked the article.
- mikl 4y agoYeah, I think it was mostly the 3D hype (and great marketing) that made Avatar a success. The movie itself is more or less just the sci-fi version of Pocahontas.
- Tagbert 4y ago"Dances with Space Wolves"
- majewsky 4y agoWhen Films&Stuff on Youtube did a 10-years-later video on Avatar [1], they said that it was not just about "the 3D hype". It was that Avatar was the first (and maybe still only) movie to use 3D effectively because they emphasized Positive Space (creating depth through 3D to strengthen immersion) over Negative Space (the popping-out-of-the-screen effect that's more commonly used because it's way more noticeable, but also gets old fast because it's fundamentally a gimmick). I too have quickly grown tired of 3D movies and actively avoided them for the last 10 years, but when Avatar 2 comes out, I will definitely see it in 3D. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt-kEIQcLKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt-kEIQcLKw
- OtomotO 4y ago
- kadomony 4y agoYo, fix that kerning, dawg.
- OtomotO 4y agoWell, the story was basically Pocahontas on an alien planet. There wasn't anything original to the plot, so... Technically it was good, but I only watched it once, I see films, just like I read books: for the story
- TameAntelope 4y agoI watch films for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the script, and Avatar had a lot going for it that wasn't written on the script when it came out, but films like that tend to age poorly. What's so impressive is that Avatar... didn't age poorly, it still looks quite good, even by our modern standards. I'll probably see these for the spectacle, if nothing else.
- outworlder 4y agoThe CGI was really well done. Helped by our brains not triggering the uncanny valley on alien faces(or at least, not nearly as much)
- webmaven 4y agoThe new typeface is nice, providing the required feel without succumbing to cliche, but now whoever is actually using it to typeset titles isn't doing any kerning! This makes the title look like it is supposed to be "Avata R" (the typographer almost certainly did create proper kerning in the font, but as soon as you start messing with different sizes and increasing the tracking, the kerning is going to have to be adjusted as well, and that wasn't done). It's like James Cameron said "Fine! I won't let my guy I had make the titles last time choose the font, we'll have a new font made. But I want the my guy to do the rest of the title work, because he'll still do it for just a crew jacket." https://www.creativebloq.com/news/avatar-way-of-water-logo https://www.creativebloq.com/news/avatar-way-of-water-logo Anyway, I quite appreciate the WIP sketches, it makes it plain what the influences are: the bones of the letters are somewhat reminiscent of typefaces like Lithos or Penumbra, and the slight blobbiness of terminals and serifs (which might otherwise be classified as either wedge or flare serifs) subtly recall both Papyrus and some "runic" typefaces. The "runic" influence shows up in some other details as well, like the 'v' of the A's crossbar. The rejected "too extreme" lowercase has a hint of Fraktur or something similar. Like Papyrus, though, this is most certainly a display font. I hope the designer gets to create a toned-down text version that will be usable for subtitles, fixing the other poor typography decision made in the first movie.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jcronenberg 4y agoThanks, now I can't ever unsee it being "AVATA R"
- codetrotter 4y agoI don't see it. It reads like "AVATAR" to me, even though this is the first time I am seeing the new logo and I read these comments before looking at the logo. Are we reading it differently? I see that there is some additional space on the top before the "R", but I think that when I am reading it I might be looking mainly at the bottom 75% of the logo, and it looks fine there so maybe that's why it still looks fine to me? Alternatively, having seen the first movie a couple of times and having seen the original logo a couple of times, maybe I am so used to the word "Avatar" from the original logo that even if I try to read the new logo as "AVATA R" I still read it as "AVATAR"? On the other hand, there is a company in Norway (and I think they are in several other countries also), called "BDO" and even though I know about their company from having heard about it several times and having even attended a couple of business presentations that they have held, I consistently misread their logo as "LBDO". You can see their logo on the Norwegian website, it has the letters "BDO" on it in blue, with an L-looking shape in red surrounding the front and underside of the letters; https://www.bdo.no/nb-no/home-no https://www.bdo.no/nb-no/home-no . So it seems that familiarity is not always enough to read a logo the way that it was intended to be read.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoShould have just used Papyrus. Now we'll never have a sequel to that SNL sketch.
- Sophistifunk 4y agoThis is why movies cost so damned much and we're stuck with nothing but reboots, sequels, rehashes, and spinoffs, because the money people need a sure thing with this kind of expenditure.
- vanderZwan 4y agoGiven that an independant funk band hired someone to design not one but two fonts purely for their own marketing material[0][1], I think you overestimate how much it costs to hire a font designer relative to the average film budget. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axrf_RPBJ6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axrf_RPBJ6g [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJEn7HcpfXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJEn7HcpfXE
- zeckalpha 4y agoLooks like the Legend of Korra logo!
- eternityforest 4y agoIt's absolutely a beautiful font. I actually really like Papyrus(And it's only Libre clone AFAIK, Qualitype QTPandora), but this feels a little more solid and impactful.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoBut Papyrus was already the perfect typeface. It has the same sense of un-earned superiority of Avatar but is ultimately terrible, just like Avatar.
- juanci_to 4y agoI'm recently seeing more content than usual about that movie. It was pretty much forgotten but now that it has a sequel on the way is something to talk about again? The font looks nice though
- recursivequine 4y agoI love how you can’t distinguish lI| in that font. Very futuristic to have that relic of the past!