Apologia Contra Arial

 

I was eating breakfast with my 15 year old daughter yesterday in Nashville at our hotel.  We got onto the topic of the upcoming event at Orleans Public Library to discuss the collection of stories from my childhood growing up there - Flowers from the Dirt.  She has been concerned that I’m using the Arial font for all my books and “everyone hates Arial”.  That struck me as a bit forceful if not exaggerated, but she assured me that that was the consensus amongst her classmates and English teacher.  I explained that I liked the simplicity of it but she insisted, “Dad, it’s too basic.  It’s like being in a room that has nothing but white walls.”   

She went on to explain about ornamentation and the importance of letters being pleasing to the eye to facilitate reading.  She pulled up fonts on her phone to illustrate what she was saying.  She talked about Times New Roman as the standard of sorts and scrolled through others to include Cambria and Garamond to show me their stylings.  I described my short story collection (Tales of the Strange & Wondrous) as having a kind of pulp fiction feel and she suggested Courier to give it an old-timey typewriter look.  For Flowers from the Dirt she thought Cambria might look nice.  And for Hear Me with its poetry and prose she thought maybe “Lexend?  I don’t know.”  

It was a fascinating conversation because I really hadn’t put much thought into the font for these books.  My focus had been on organizing the stories, designing the covers, and writing the blurbs on the back.  Fonts just hadn’t figured into the creative calculus until this moment of sitting across a two-person table watching her eat waffles.  

She’s a creative kid and I thanked her for her input, though she informed me her interests lie mostly in music.  This checks out as her 10 year old self wrote me a lovely melancholy tune on her ukulele called “Take My Hand” and I hear her sometimes in the basement working out songs on guitar from some of her favorite singer-songwriters.  “I’m not into the visual arts so much” she confided, but I reminded her of the beautiful abstracts she created with paints and a butter knife during the first summer of the Pandemic.  

And then I felt my mind wandering and wondering - where did this captivating young lady come from?  How is it she’s schooling me on the importance and place of fonts in improving the reading experience?  It’s like having a 15 year old literary agent.  I told her I’ve read a lot over the years, but the mystery of fonts had not been fully revealed to me.  The font had to be pretty outlandish to distract me and pull my notice.  In my mind the letters have simply been teeth on a cogwheel and as long as the information is being transferred in the machinery of my brain, I hadn’t noticed the shape so much.  

But “everyone hates Arial” don’t you know?  I’ll have to keep that in mind moving forward and be more mindful of my font choices.

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For full disclosure, pretty much my entire blog is in Arial including this post.

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