Inkwell, a family of hand-drawn yet formal typefaces

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/06/29/inkwell-a-family-of-hand-draw.html

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No, no, it’s not like Comic Sans. This has style, and looks like it was actually designed. I’d be happy to letter a comic book with this, print an invitation, make signs for a store, etc., and not be embarrassed.

Now I have no idea if this has the dyslexia-sparing features of Comic Sans, but I hope it does.

The only thing stopping me is the price. At $40, I’d buy it. At $400. sorry, not that much in need of it. I recognize the effort, I’m just not going to get $400 of value from it over my lifetime.

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Not similar to comic sans, IMO, and that’s a good thing; comic sans should never be used outside of dialog balloons in actual comics.

I think these typefaces were actually pretty charming.

Speaking of charm:

A

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This paragraph was an emotional and grammatical rollercoaster. A font of multitudes.

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Hoefler is a great typographer and this font family is very well done, but it’s nothing new. Laura Worthington has released several excellent families, like Adorn and Charcuterie, with a similar aesthetic. If you look around MyFonts you’ll find dozens of others, some very good and many crap.

The Comic Sans comparison is absurd. There’s no similarity at all; comic-lettering fonts are a quite different style (and again, there are zillions of good ones; I recommend Nate Piekos’s Blambot foundry.) the comparison is only made because people who know nothing of typography have only Comic Sans as a reference for hand-drawn fonts.

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I like to think of Comic Sans as the cilantro of fonts. Or vice versa.

Not at all a bad thing as such; but you really must know where to use it, and how much of it.

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I mean, it’s not fucking Papyrus.

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Well, it had to have at one point though…

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I was really bummed out when CERNs decision to present the Higgs Boson findings in Comic Sans was only an April fool’s joke.

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:thinking: Could it be that the “sans” in “Comic Sans” is not so much to say “Sans-serif” as to say “Without-real-comic-bookness”? Hmm…Comic Ersatz? Comic Faux? Comic Faux-pas?

“No real comic books were harmed in the making of this font.”

The experiments on dyslexia came down to the fact that when AB’d, the novel font won. When those with dyslexia had months of use with this (and other fonts that were seen as having been beneficial and built according to the ideas that they felt were helping the subjects … i.e., weighing the font down so that the bottoms and specific sides had a visual heft to tie it down)…turns out they were actually LESS USEFUL for folks with dyslexia.

The only real thing these fonts taught was that if you have this disorder…you require change on a regular basis. Neurologically, dyslexia is closer to ADHD than any visual distortion. I have both ADHD and dyslexia…so I was kinda trying this all out a few years ago and came to the same conclusions as the researchers (that weren’t trying to make money off of it! You won’t find the makers of Dyslexie Font admitting this!!!)

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When people get so mouth-frothingly-annoyed at seeing Comic Sans, there really is no reason to use any other font.

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