Why the Cooper Black typeface is everywhere

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/16/why-the-cooper-black-typeface.html

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I will take it over Comic Sans.

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Must be a movie coming out.

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X-All-The-Y_phixr

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Hσɯ Iɳƚҽɾҽʂƚιɳɠ.

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I missed the word “type” in the headline the first two scans through and was briefly very upset.

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yeah, ok; ads, signs, album covers.
talk to me about beamed-into-millions-of-homes-coast-to-coast.
this video missed the biggest boat of them all:
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in italics

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and, the biggie

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First thing I thought of when I read ‘Cooper Black’ was all those 70s TV shows that used the typeface for their titles. And, seemingly, always in that yellow color. Yikes!

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yeah, there must have been a very specific, limited color choice on whatever video-effects machine was the industry standard back then.
but Cheers didn’t even start until the eighties and went until around '90 as I recall.

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I wonder if the color had to do with the number of black & white televisions still around in the 70s, and wanting color that translated OK to older sets. For example, our family didn’t get a color TV until 1981.

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That makes a lot of sense, though the pedant in me has to point out that Cheers was an 80’s tv show.

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Came here for this. Done in one.

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The color was generally known as “TV yellow” and was common in early graphics (type) generators like Compositor and Chyron. It was the ‘official’ color of CBS titles. It lies close to the ‘I’ axis of the NTSC color system, where human flesh tone lives, and so is less subject to distortions (the ‘I’ channel has the higher bandwidth of the I & Q axes).

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All fonts are not equally usable by all people. I’ve read that Comic Sans is most readable by Westerners with dyslexia.

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as a type geek, this video pleases me greatly. :two_hearts:

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Best use of Cooper Black:

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… and if you’re a font or design nerd, the Helvetica documentary is well worth a rental:

As ubiquitous as Cooper Black is, it doesn’t hold a candle to Helvetica.

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you didn’t watch the video, did you?

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If I did or didn’t, would it make my comment any less valid?

(Vox has top notch YouTube content, so it’s well worth watching.)

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Well, it is a nice, friendly looking font.

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