Here We Are: What Makes Us Human

29. Marie Dufour [Typefaces]

• Joy Bork • Episode 29

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Some things deserve to be fought about and opinions hard fought for. One of those things for my friend Marie and me is typefaces. Fonts. How letters are shown in the world. Sometimes it is good. Sometimes it is really bad. But above all else, NEVER use Comic Sans, Papyrus, or Bleeding Cowboy.

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Joy Bork:

Welcome to Here We Are. The podcast where we talk about curiosity, fascination, and what makes us delightfully nerdy. I am your host for the day, Joy Bork. I am literally so excited about this episode. I have been a font slash typeface nerd since I started playing on computers around the age of four. I will come clean and say that I definitely had my era in grade school of using Papyrus and Comic Sans. But I will also point out that those were the days before those fonts were overused and became disgusting to my eyes. Anyways. On a recent recording of the other podcast I'm on, parks and rewatch, many of our listeners joined us to heckle ask questions and correct us when we've got our facts off. Marie makes it a point to come to as many of these recordings as she can. And I absolutely love it. So we're on this recording and somehow we start talking about fonts. And that was it. That was the moment I knew that I had to interview Marie about fonts, and type faces, and all the things. So without further ado, here's my friend, Marie, to chat with us about type faces.

Marie Dufour:

I'm Marie Dufour. I live in Omaha, Nebraska, and I work as a graphic designer.

Joy Bork:

and as a graphic designer, what is something that you use all the time?

Marie Dufour:

Fonts, yeah!

Joy Bork:

Wait a second. Graphic designers have opinions on fonts?

Marie Dufour:

Never.

Joy Bork:

Okay. Okay. So we can start it off with a fight that you and I have already had, but the world has not witnessed our fight. What is the actual worst font ever?

Marie Dufour:

Papyrus, Obviously.

Joy Bork:

How is Papyrus not as bad as Comic Sans or worse than Comic Sans?

Marie Dufour:

it's harder to read than Comic Sans. Comic Sans is the second worst in the entire world, but Papyrus is harder to read.

Joy Bork:

And then there was some psychopath out there that decided to combine them and make comic Papyrus.

Marie Dufour:

Yeah.

Joy Bork:

What a jerk. Okay. The other fight we've had is what font is appropriate for everyday documents?

Marie Dufour:

Personally, I don't feel like there's one single font that's appropriate for everyday documents, but just being lazy and using Calibri is not great.

Joy Bork:

right? Yes.

Marie Dufour:

Arial is also not great.

Joy Bork:

I default to Arial. I feel like Helvetica is also kind of in that default zone. I mean, it's, as long as it's not Times New Roman, right?

Marie Dufour:

Yeah. And Helvetica is great. Helvetica is my graphic design professor's favorite font.

Joy Bork:

Okay.

Marie Dufour:

So of the favorite swear words in the graphic design community is to say what the hell-vetica?

Joy Bork:

Amazing. Have you watched the Helvetica documentary?

Marie Dufour:

No, But I need to! I've heard. It's amazing.

Joy Bork:

So good.

Marie Dufour:

Really good.

Joy Bork:

Wow. Okay. When did you realize that you had an opinion about fonts?

Marie Dufour:

I started getting into graphic design when I was in high school. And I think it was probably around that time when I started really playing around with fonts. I mean, I'm a kid of the nineties, so I grew up with, one of those honkin Toshiba,

Joy Bork:

yes.

Marie Dufour:

it's huge computers I would always play in paint, but I would also design books in Word, and use Word Art all over the place.

Joy Bork:

With the gradients.

Marie Dufour:

Oh yeah.

Joy Bork:

Drop shadow outline.

Marie Dufour:

Well, think, I mean, I really started playing around with fonts back then. Of course, nowadays I know better than to use word art. I think I started really having stronger opinions probably in college.

Joy Bork:

What kind of books did you design?

Marie Dufour:

I loved creative writing. So I would write stories and design them.

Joy Bork:

That's hilarious to me and amazing. Because when I was in high school, I wrote my own magazine.

Marie Dufour:

Oh, that's awesome. I did too.

Joy Bork:

What was your magazine called?

Marie Dufour:

I made two different ones and maybe it wasn't, it was actually in junior high. I made one with my friends for our homeschool group. it was like, I don't know, we had everyone vote on what they wanted it to be named. I think it was called like the knickknack corner or something. And so I guess it was a little bit more of a newspaper than a magazine, but it was just like, I don't know, fun little stories and games and jokes, and fun things like that. And then I made another one for my family that was like, Baker's corner. Cause our, my maiden name is Baker. And then it was like, I dunno, family stories and family updates and stuff like that. I made it in columns and I gave it all of this, you know, justification and

Joy Bork:

Right.

Marie Dufour:

clip art,

Joy Bork:

Microsoft Publisher?

Marie Dufour:

No, actually I didn't even know that was a thing at the time. I should have used it

Joy Bork:

I

Marie Dufour:

nowadays, like in design, but.

Joy Bork:

I used to get in trouble for trying to print my own business cards by taping business cards to regular paper, and then getting all of that jammed in the paper. great. It's fine. The hours my parents spent fixing the things that I somehow ruined or just, I appreciate them. Thank you, mom. Thank you, dad. Um, Wow. Did you do photography for that too?

Marie Dufour:

Not at the time. No, I didn't really start getting into photography until college. I did a little bit of like nature photography. My dad taught me how to do photos when I was younger. And so I did some nature photography, but I never was super interested in doing like journalistic or people photography until college.

Joy Bork:

That's so fascinating to me. It seems like even in the short conversation, a lot of things you've already said are like, all of this happened once I hit college. Was that the big turning point?

Marie Dufour:

I mean, right before college was more where I started learning it more professionally. I took classes in high school and I really, I mean, like I said, I played with those book designs and that was in like grade school. I did design stuff for a lot of my life, but actually knowing what was good design and what are good fonts and bad fonts and like caring about the sort of nerdiness part of it was probably in college. Yeah.

Joy Bork:

okay. So when you say good fonts and bad fonts, in your humble opinion, what are traits that make a font good?

Marie Dufour:

Legibility is the most important. I think the point of most typography, I won't say all because sometimes it's really just art, but most typography, the point of it is to be able to read it. So. If you're designing something for anybody else and you intend for them to be able to read the words on that page, is important thing. I would say I don't even know what the second most important would be, but after that, it's kind of a balance of what's the style of what you're designing and who's the intended audience? And it depends on the context, but you may not want every single document to look exactly the same. If you're working in corporate America and you work for a company and you're creating business documents, then that's a little bit different because you do want consistency and really clean design, and you want to pick a font that is your brand font. And consistently use that throughout all your documents. But. If you're designing a magazine or you're designing several different, like I do series art a lot for our church, you don't necessarily want all of those to look exactly the same. So then at that point you want something unique and you want it to not look like every other thing that somebody else made. Or with logos and brands, like you don't want your logo to look like you did just use Helvetica, even though it's a great font. Like you don't want someone to look at your font and go, oh yeah, I know what font that is.

Joy Bork:

But American Airlines did it.

Marie Dufour:

There are lots of logos and lots of non-unique fonts, but.

Joy Bork:

How do you know when you're prepping for a design, like how do you know when the font is right? Because I catch myself just scrolling for forever being like eh,

Marie Dufour:

When I do design projects, a lot of times I'll look on Pinterest or Behance or some other websites for inspiration and of look at other things that are in the same design style of what I am intending to get at the end of my project. So I'll use that to kind of guide my font choice. So I know that I want this design to be clean and modern. So I'm probably gonna look at Sans Serif fonts. I'm not going to bother looking at the scripty ones. Or maybe I'm designing a wedding invitation for my friend. I want it to be fancy and scripty. I know I'm only going to look at the scripty fonts. I don't even need to bother with the sans serifs.

Joy Bork:

Okay hold up. For people who aren't anywhere on the font nerd spectrum, can you please describe the difference between serif and sans serif?

Marie Dufour:

Yes. So I believe the words come from French. I know sans, which is actually sans, is French for, without. My description of the word serif is those little teensey things on the edges of each letter that kind of stick out. So if you have the letter I and it has bars on the top and probably a serif. got a letter T and it has little dangily things

Joy Bork:

Like the little icicles.

Marie Dufour:

Yeah. The little icicles coming off of a T those icicles are serifs.

Joy Bork:

Fascinating.

Marie Dufour:

So fonts that are Serifs have those on a lot of their letters fonts. That are sans Serif, again sans is French for without, don't have those little icicle dangly things. that's the two biggest categories of fonts.

Joy Bork:

are there rules of thumb of when to use a Serif and when not to use a serif?

Marie Dufour:

Generally, yes. In general, you should not be using Cerus on screens. you don't because it makes it harder to read because of the pixelation. So because of how small Serifs are, if you're scrolling through a website and, you know, font is kind of small, that can make it tougher for your eye to read through a line of text. So typically if you're designing a website, unless you're making a few like splash titles, that's fine. You can do whatever. But if you're putting like a whole block of text on your website, it should be in a Sans serif font.

Joy Bork:

Do you have a favorite font?

Marie Dufour:

It depends on my mood,

Joy Bork:

Or like a font that you end up coming back to often? Not necessarily because it's a brand font?

Marie Dufour:

Probably not. I think I worked so much within our brand. That's more what I'm used to. That's what I go back to is our brand font.

Joy Bork:

That is a helpful thing. it saves a lot of time.

Marie Dufour:

it really does. Yeah. So I do like our brand font. We changed our fonts a couple of years ago and we use Proxima Nova now, which mean is kind of a popular font right now.

Joy Bork:

it sure is.

Marie Dufour:

but it's available on Adobe fonts. So anyone who has Adobe can automatically have it and not have to pay for it, which is awesome.

Joy Bork:

That's really cool

Marie Dufour:

I mean, you pay for it with your expensive Adobe subscription, but.

Joy Bork:

Details. Details. How many fonts is too many in one document?

Marie Dufour:

oh, in one document, I thought you were gonna say on a computer. And I was like, ah, I have so many! Uh, in one document you should stick to two or three.

Joy Bork:

Okay.

Marie Dufour:

also depends on how much text is in your document. If there's not a lot of text, then don't get crazy.

Joy Bork:

I'm really glad you said two to three, because that makes my heart feel so much better.

Marie Dufour:

Two to three. And typically you want to make sure that they're pretty different as well. So like our brand fonts, we have one serif and one sans Serif. So if you're designing a layout, you shouldn't have two sans serifs, like they'll look too similar. That's silly. Why would you do that? Pick a serif, pick a sans serif, and if you want to add something fancy, scripty, handwritten feeling that's your third, that's it.

Joy Bork:

So is this similar to color theory where it's to your benefit to use contrast in colors like a warm and a cool?

Marie Dufour:

Sort of, I think it's all about visual hierarchy. if you

Joy Bork:

tell me more.

Marie Dufour:

Visual Hierarchy is like the importance of things on a page or layout or design based on how your brain, how your eyes respond to it. So if you're looking at a page and there is a big, bold title that's than the rest of the text on the page, your eyes are going to go there first. So. When you're designing and choosing fonts, you could choose a bolder font for the title or maybe something more scripty because it's only two words that you're putting in it and you're making that big and at the top. And then you have your whole entire article or passage or whatever. and that's lot longer and you're going to be reading it for a longer amount of time. So you want it to be easier to read, so you might pick a simpler font, whether that's a serif or a sans serif. So that might help you like decide what funds you're going to use on the page and where. You wouldn't want to flip that and use a simple font for your title and then put your entire giant paragraph in script. Nobody's going to sit there and read that.

Joy Bork:

That makes sense. When you are designing with fonts, how much of that is you just being like, this looks good. And how much of it is like formulaic or like you're doing it because you think the audience expects it a certain way.

Marie Dufour:

Uh, half and half, maybe?

Joy Bork:

Okay.

Marie Dufour:

I'm designing a lot of the time for the church that I work for. So we have a brand, so that would kind of be the, my audience is expecting it to look a certain way. We have fonts that we typically use. We have sizes that we typically use depending on where it's getting printed or displayed or whatever. But when I'm looking at like series art, we're not using that font necessarily, we're looking through some crazy cool fonts or whatever.

Joy Bork:

Just not bleeding cowboy.

Marie Dufour:

Just not bleeding cowboy ever. Never. I,

Joy Bork:

That was cool when I was in college.

Marie Dufour:

that is a backpack of of shame I carry

Joy Bork:

Oh,

Marie Dufour:

I

Joy Bork:

no,

Marie Dufour:

in high school and I thought it was so cool. And now I'm like,

Joy Bork:

it was cool then

Marie Dufour:

Yeah, it was, it's just the legibility thing. It's really hard to read.

Joy Bork:

It is.

Marie Dufour:

but yeah, so at that point, if I'm designing sermon series art, usually the sermon series title is two or three words, max. So I can be creative with what font I choose for that. So I'll look through a couple of different, a couple different, when I say a couple it's 50 different fonts, do

Joy Bork:

fine.

Marie Dufour:

It's fine. what I think looks cool with the art and with the style that we're heading for. And yeah. So then at that point, it's. It's a mix of my preferences and what the audience will expect.

Joy Bork:

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah

Marie Dufour:

I think as for your like formulaic comment, when it comes to designing like magazine layouts or anything that has a ton of text on it, it does get really formulaic because you have grids and you have spacing, you have spacing between the lines you have, like proper font size, general rule of thumb is 10 is about a good font size. You can go down to eight, but you really don't want to go

Joy Bork:

Hmm

Marie Dufour:

No one is going to be able to read it, but if you're producing, like reader's digest senior edition, then you probably need to be more like 14, 16 point font.

Joy Bork:

that makes sense.

Marie Dufour:

So it depends on your target audience and stuff like that. But you do think through the formulaic of the size and spacing between the lines, stuff like that, you have too much space between your lines of text and your brain gets disconnected and you're like, wait? But it's too close and your brain will skip over lines and then do wait, what's going on?

Joy Bork:

Yeah.

Marie Dufour:

definitely a formula to that. And also a formula to the space between letters too.

Joy Bork:

Science man. Okay. What font have you seen in the wild that makes you cringe every time outside of Papyrus and comic Sans?

Marie Dufour:

Dang it, I was going to say comic sans! There is an auto body shop in town that uses comic Sans, and

Joy Bork:

why that's not, no, because it wasn't the purpose of comic Sans to be like kid friendly.

Marie Dufour:

well it's a comic. It's for comics. If you saw a comic drawn with Superman's quote above his head, it honestly probably wouldn't even bother me if it was in comic Sans in that context,

Joy Bork:

I think it would still bother me.

Marie Dufour:

comics.

Joy Bork:

I would know.

Marie Dufour:

You would know that was the intention. And nowadays I would say it's acceptable for like kids things are in an elementary classroom, whatever. I'm not going to judge a teacher who uses it for their second grade curriculum. That's fine. Do whatever you want with your second graders, but yeah, not for an auto body shop. Like it doesn't look professional or like,

Joy Bork:

No, no. I think. I've seen some shops that their their titles are in Ravie. It's like big and blocky with like there's a sideways oval inside of the R and it's very curvy and big. And I used to think it was really cool.

Marie Dufour:

how's it spelled? I'm

Joy Bork:

R a V I E

Marie Dufour:

Oh, I just found it. Yeah.

Joy Bork:

or Jokerman? Do you remember Jokerman?

Marie Dufour:

I use

Joy Bork:

that has like all of the boxes and dots on the outside of the words? letters.

Marie Dufour:

Curlz MT....

Joy Bork:

Oh my gosh. Curlz MT! And brush script MT!

Marie Dufour:

Yep.

Joy Bork:

You're really getting down serious if you use brush script MT.

Marie Dufour:

so along the same lines, then I would say probably the other font that bothers me when I see it in the wild, besides papyrus and comic Sans is Bradley hand.

Joy Bork:

Oh, that gets used so much.

Marie Dufour:

That's a lot. It was literally,

Joy Bork:

no,

Marie Dufour:

it was onstage in the Superbowl halftime show this year.

Joy Bork:

no.

Marie Dufour:

Yeah, it was. And so I literally took a picture of it and sent it to one of my graphic design friends. And I was like, are they using Bradley hand right now? It doesn't make sense. It does.

Joy Bork:

I feel like there are certain demographics that tend to use the same fonts over and over again. I'm going to say this as kindly as I can. I feel like boomers think that comic Sans is appropriate for everyday communication. I disagree. If You are a boomer and you would like to fight with me about it, please send me an email at herewearethepodcast@gmail.com and I will loop Marie in and we will fight. Oh gosh. There's a whole contingency of women's ministries that use I think Bradley hand and a couple others in that vein. There's just, I like wellness centers use papyruses

Marie Dufour:

Yep.

Joy Bork:

kids places use comic Sans,

Marie Dufour:

Yep.

Joy Bork:

country bands use bleeding cowboy. If you guys don't know what these fonts look like, please pause this podcast and pull out your browser and just Google it. Your life may or may not be better for it. And you may or may not start seeing these everywhere around you and you may or may not enjoy it. Welcome to the dark side.

Marie Dufour:

One of the fun parts of being married are pointing things out like that to my husband and him being like, I would have never noticed this before you, and now he'll notice things before me sometimes. Billboard and he'd be like, Hey Marie, you probably don't like that billboard. Do you? And I'm like,

Joy Bork:

that you mentioned it. That's so funny. Oh gosh. There's so many things I want to ask you. What do you wish people knew about fonts? What do people get wrong about fonts?

Marie Dufour:

They're not always free?

Joy Bork:

That is true.

Marie Dufour:

Like ones that come on your computer, like along with Microsoft or whatever are, you can use them for whatever you want. But if you go online to just download a bunch of fonts, they're not all free. In fact, a lot of the ones on the free font website are actually free for personal use only. So one thing that bothers me a lot is when I find templates or designs or something someone a designer has downloaded a font, a free font for, and then it's only available for personal use. And I'm like, well, I have to replace this font then, because legally I don't feel morally okay with using this font if I'm using it for a business purpose.

Joy Bork:

that's tricky.

Marie Dufour:

So, I mean, that's something that bothers me in general, in the graphic design community. Like overall people who aren't necessarily aware that stuff just because it's online isn't free. That's the same with images, fonts, stuff like that. People don't realize it's stealing, even though it's intellectual property. It's

Joy Bork:

right,

Marie Dufour:

the same as walking into your grocery store and stealing a Snickers bar.

Joy Bork:

right.

Marie Dufour:

just because something's on Google does not mean that it's free. It

Joy Bork:

Valid.

Marie Dufour:

someone took the time to design it or to

Joy Bork:

Right.

Marie Dufour:

it, edit it, whatever. So about getting your fonts or images, et cetera, in proper legal manner.

Joy Bork:

This has been a copyright PSA from Marie

Marie Dufour:

Another thing I'm Passionately nerdy about

Joy Bork:

That's fantastic. Who has been a key part of your font journey?

Marie Dufour:

Probably professor Howell. He was my professor at ORU for all of my graphic design classes, a lot of my art degree classes, I Helvetica was his favorite font that

Joy Bork:

okay.

Marie Dufour:

guided me in appreciating simplicity and legibility and like

Joy Bork:

Yeah,

Marie Dufour:

clean steel of fonts. And I spent the most time with him as far as my time learning about graphic design. So. He probably is the biggest impact on my font picking.

Joy Bork:

That's fantastic. There's something I love so much about people whose flavor of nerd is font. Cause I, I do have opinions. I don't know everything about them, but I do have strong opinions and I don't, I can't necessarily tell you why I like or don't like something, but I can definitely tell you if I like it, or I don't like it. Especially with like lyrics on a screen. I have definite opinions about that. And yeah, we could go on about that for days.

Marie Dufour:

well, one nerdy thing that I could contribute here before we move on, is that fonts, aren't actually called fonts. They're called typefaces.

Joy Bork:

Oh, my gosh.

Marie Dufour:

a font is actually whether or not it's bold, extra bold, semi bold, italic, a light, whatever, all of those little extra words that you find at the end of some of your fonts. That's actually the font is the weight of it or the style of it. The font itself, what the general population would call the font, is actually called a typeface. So Proxima Nova is a type face. I might use Proxima Nova extra bold, that font of it as the header and the rest of the text. I might use medium that's. Those are the fonts, but approximate Nova is the typeface. So

Joy Bork:

That is mind blowing

Marie Dufour:

proper terminology

Joy Bork:

that worth the price of admission.

Marie Dufour:

being said in average conversation, it's one of those things that you just call it a font anyways. Cause that's what

Joy Bork:

Cause that's what the Muggles call it.

Marie Dufour:

Yeah. Yep.

Joy Bork:

Oh, good conversation. Thanks Marie.

Marie Dufour:

you're welcome.

Joy Bork:

So here we are! It was so fun to let this part of my nerd shine forth with a fellow human who shares similar opinions to myself. In most things. I'm still sticking with Arial as my default font for now, but you know what? We can agree to disagree. Secretly. I really hope that you all start seeing the type faces that surround you differently and that you will become more curious. And join us forever in our hatred of comic Sans, papyrus, bradley hand and the like. It's a fun place to be. Marie. Thanks again for your time and for lending us your nerd. All right. I've got to know what is one of your flavors of nerd? How does it show up in your life? What does it look like? If you're open to sharing about it and possibly being featured on the podcast, send me an email at herewearethepodcast@gmail.com. Also feel free to join the here we are community online by following here we are on our Facebook page and Instagram. If you're looking to go one step further and financially support what I'm doing with this podcast, head on over to patrion.com. Search for here we are at the podcast and sign up for one of the many quirky support tiers. Like loyalest llama because I love llamas and I'm also a very loyal human. So, if you're going to sign up for the loyalest llama spot, I would also assume that you like llamas and you are also a loyal human. So come join me. And until next time. Don't forget that curiosity wins. And the world needs more nerds. Bye.