Font Cities

Posted by mike d. 10 comments

At lunch this week Jocelyn and I were talking about text fonts and cities. The question is: If you had to choose a font to describe a city in its entirety, what font would you choose? Let’s take a look at Hartford, first we’ll start simply by describing the city, then we’ll try to find a font that screams ‘Hartford’

Hartford has a lot of insurance companies. Not many people live in the city and it’s about as far as you can get from ‘college town.’ It’s reasonably clean and seems to be a growing city. It has a good museum scene. It’s somewhat modern but it’s kind of tough to drive around. The public transportation is poor at best, but there’s a decent amount of parking.

Now for fonts… start by checking out this monster image of fonts:

now… think Hartford.

Hartford is too modern for a Times New Roman and too formal to be anywhere near Wingdings. Courier New isn’t a bad choice, but I think Hartford has enough complexity to it to escape the burdensome scenario where each letter takes up the exact same number of longitudinal pixels.* And obviously, Hartford is not a script font.

Then there’s Ariel. Not a bad choice really, it doesn’t have any serifs (I don’t think Hartford is quite worthy of serifs). It might be just a tad bit too boring for Hartford. It shouldn’t be a bold or italicized font. Century is too classy. Helvetica… Helvetica could work. So could Raavi.

I think I prefer Raavi.

What font do you think best describes your city?

*there’s a word for this type of font. Anyone know it?

Filed in Features, Geekdom 10 comments
10 Comments
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Nov 15, 2007
3:53 am
#1 Paul :

Worchester is so Wingdings 3

[Reply]

Nov 15, 2007
5:02 am
#2 the name :

monospace

[Reply]

Nov 15, 2007
8:29 am
#3 Jes Saint :

I’m gonna say Poor Richard. It’s traditional, understated, and fairly easy to overlook, but not completely boring.

[Reply]

Nov 15, 2007
12:47 pm
#4 Andrew :

I’ve always called them “fixed width” fonts, but yeah monospace is at least as good a word.

Boston is Garamond, I’d say. Classic, legible, stately. The high aspect ratio conveys the sophisticated tastes of the well-educated. I think the ascenders and descenders on the numerals add a little bit of class, like the brick sidewalks of the South End add to Boston. The tiny little eye on the ‘e’ is actually kind of odd-looking if you look really close — which you can say about pretty much any Bostonian you see on the street.

[Reply]

Nov 15, 2007
2:23 pm
#5 Ryan Schenk :

Arial is a cheapened derivative of Helvetica. Arial is not nearly as pretty, but the character widths and proportions are all the same as Helvetica.

Hartford isn’t Helvetica. Hartford is not in Switzerland.

[Reply]

Nov 15, 2007
3:17 pm
#6 Aaron :

I’d vote for Microsoft Sans Serif because that font fills me dread (like reading help files), just like driving through Hartford does.

[Reply]

Nov 16, 2007
3:37 pm
#7 Ben :

Death to Arial, long live Helvetica.

[Reply]

Nov 18, 2007
11:38 pm
#8 Jesse :

Mike, Ariel is a small mutant fem-fish, not a font.

[Reply]

Nov 19, 2007
11:40 am
#9 Jes Saint :

Ariel is a mermaid.

[Reply]

Nov 23, 2007
1:12 pm
#10 Paul Scott :

The appropriate font is “Black Arial”

[Reply]

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