What Your Font Says About You

Reader, as a clothing fanatic, you know that design is important and that a single millimeter of fabric more or less can make the difference between a gawd and a frump. But clothing is not the only craft where subtle aesthetic choices can transform our general impression of something. For example, the way text is formatted can alter your reading experience dramatically without you really being able to put your finger on why. Sure, part of it is layout, but there's something really interesting about fonts. It's hard to pay attention to a font when you're reading: Typically, the typeface becomes seemingly transparent as you stop looking at the particular shape of the letters to focus on the concepts that the letters produce when grouped together. However, every font projects a very specific mood, and picking out a font is just as significant a choice as picking out a shirt. So, what do these choices mean?

Emily Lever is a French-American writer who wishes she led a life of adventure. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Courier New

You're an aspiring investigative reporter for The New York Times who tucks a pencil behind his ear and is obsessed with the "Golden Age of Journalism." Every night you play old recordings of Walter Cronkite's voice as you drift off into dreams of a world that makes sense, where there are only three TV channels and the President trembles at every tap of your keyboard.

That or you just want to inflate the page count on your high school journalism paper.

Lucida Blackletter

You read The Silmarillion religiously at every lunar eclipse and tell everyone who's willing to listen that it's way better than The Lord of the Rings. Not that this isn't true or anything. You may or may not commune spiritually with small, sun-dappled bodies of water.

Matura M7 Script Capitals

Unless you are printing out some haikus you wrote for your third grade English class (that's not a put-down, just the context in which I most recently used that font), you're almost definitely making invitations to a party whose theme is an Eastern culture that you're not from. In short, you are an Orientalist.

Copperplate Gothic Light

You spent waaaaaay too much time designing your business card, while you pictured yourself stunting on all the peasants who lack your acute aesthetic eye. Paul Allen's business card is really fucking ugly and his abuse of drop caps is more horrifying than anything Patrick Bateman does, but that's neither here nor there.

Basically, your problem is that you tend to mistake pretension and self-importance for beauty.