Motivation… hmm, how should I describe it? It’s like a passing cloud in the sky, one minute it’s there, and then it’s gone. So much of being an artist, a writer, or a human being, is trying to “capture” this passing cloud and box it in. Some people seem to be naturally good at these kinds of things, those weirdos who can motivate themselves to wake up at 6 am, work for a designated amount of time, and clock out sometimes late but never early. Unfortunately, most of us just aren’t blessed like that. By “most of us”, I mean… people like you or me. The type of people who are likely to click on weird sketchy websites. My generation, most likely.
Gen Z is often mischaracterized as being “lazy”, but I think the better word would be “unmotivated”. The world that we have been born into seems so doomed from the get-go that it’s hard to find any sort of external motivation at all. See, I used to dream of being an artist. I suppose I already am an artist, but I mean… the REAL kind of artist. The kind of artist that is respected by the elitist art world, but still appreciated by the general public. I had gone so far with this dream that I *almost* applied for art school. I was halfway through with making my portfolio, in fact. But then… everything changed when the AI nation attacked. Yeah, it was horrible timing, because of course just when I was so close to taking the first real step to achieving my dream, some tech bros in California decided to drop the nuclear bomb that was ChatGPT. Following that, a million other generative AI tools followed.
I thought I was going crazy, because I was the only person I knew who actually saw the threat that AI would become. I was nervous, not just for my future, but the future of humanity as a whole. We finally managed to create a tool that makes humans obsolete. Still, it was only 2022, and most people only viewed these generative tools as being a fun toy, not the world altering tech it actually is. I fell into a depression for the next month or so, struggling with the question of… “what now?”. What do I do, if not art? What else am I possibly good at? It didn’t help that everyone else around me was still trying to gaslight me that AI wasn’t going to actually “steal” anyone’s jobs, and that I was just overreacting. As it turns out, I was right all along. Recently, commission based artists have been sharing how they are losing more and more clients as a result of AI, and there are multiple companies that have already been exposed for using AI art in their products. I really, truly wish that I had been wrong.
Back to motivation, right. I had to now figure out a way to reallocate all the motivation and passion I had put into my art into something completely different. After many strokes of bad luck, I managed to get a stroke of good luck at last. I signed up for a social science class, and my teacher there was probably one of the strangest and most motivating teachers I’ve ever had. I’ve had plenty of teachers in the past who believed in me, who motivated me to follow my passions, but this one came at just the right time. He looked through the project I turned in, and then he looked through it again. What followed wasn’t the typical spiel about how I have “potential”, or that I’m a great student… no, it was an actual sense of wonder. Like the wonder you got as a kid when you saw snow for the first time. I got enough points on that first project so that I would never have to do another assignment in that class, although I went ahead and did them anyways like the overachiever I am. To this day, I’m still not sure how exactly I managed to do that; to genuinely impress someone with my awkward writings. Still, it worked, and it was that class and that teacher that restored some of the motivation I had lost.
My whole life, my identity has hinged on being an artist. I really mean it. In certain ways, I was an artist before I was a human. In grade school, I was the kid who sat in the corner and barely spoke, but I would always be doodling. My classmates who didn’t know a thing about my personality knew me only for my art, to the point where I had become a mini celebrity at my school. Those were my happy days, and the reason why I hinge so much of who I am on my ability to create. I allowed my creations to take center stage, me myself being only the means of production. When I gave up on my goal of becoming a professional artist, I suddenly had to reevaluate everything that I thought I knew about myself, and I came to the conclusion that I have no identity outside of being an artist.
Enough time has passed since then that I have mostly recovered from the overwhelming sense of dread, but I’m still far from truly understanding myself. I am also far from knowing what I want to do with my life. For most of human history, there was little to no change from generation to generation. If your grandfather was a baker, then your father was a baker - and if your father was a baker, you would become a baker too, and so would your offspring. That was life. Nowadays, thanks to exponential technological growth, my family basically went from being a bunch of rural farmers to computer scientists within the lifespan of one tortoise. How could you possibly know what you want to do when you grow up when by the time you do grow up, the world has evolved into something completely unrecognizable?
So no, I don’t know what I wanna be when I get older, and I’m already “older”. Just like Madam Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, I do often feel like a plastic bag, drifting in the wind. Peace comes to me in small capsules whenever I’m reminded that no matter how shitty the world becomes, life will continue and I will too. There’s not really a happy ending to all of this, and by January, the world will arguably only get worse. However, we have to detach ourselves from whatever has anchored us to the past and allow the wind to carry us wherever it takes us, if we want to live.
Have you ever looked at a font and thought, “wow, that looks delicious?” I mean, really, like I would EAT THAT? If this thought has never crossed your mind, then you are not the target audience for this piece, and you can promptly click off this website and go read something else, or more likely, go scroll through Tiktok. The rest of you who are still here, let me tell you that you are not alone. You’re probably also at least a little autistic, but hey, so am I, but I’m not your doctor. This whole entry is dedicated to my favorite mundanity of life: fonts.
First off, let’s just get this out of the way. Yes, there is a difference between “fonts” and “typefaces”, and what I will be referring to as “fonts” are actually typefaces. I’m doing this because 99% of the world knows that the things that you select on a drop on menu in a word doc or a powerpoint presentation to be called “fonts”, and nobody cares if a small group of word nerds think otherwise. Moving on.
MLA format is a tragedy, really. I despise that moment at the end of every essay when I have to highlight all the words on my document and switch whatever font I had been writing in into Times New Roman. Times New Roman is not a horrible font, not really, it’s just… so boring. So are all the other “default” fonts, such as Arial, Calibri, and Helvetica. They serve the purpose of being bland on purpose, so that they can fit into anything and not contribute anything at the same time. It’s like the monobloc chair: it will fit into any environment, but it will never stand out or elevate the scene in any way. Still, I understand the purpose of these fonts, it’s one of those necessary evils in the world. If people were allowed to pick whatever font they wanted on a formal document, you would see research papers written in comic sans, or even worse, one of those pretty but eligible cursive fonts. I would assume that that wouldn’t be a common occurrence, but it would happen frequently enough that these restrictions have to exist just in case (no pun intended).
Still, I’m afraid of the wide reaching effects that this lack of font freedom has on our society. Like the private school kids who will wear their school uniform even outside of school, there are “graphic designers” who will use a default font even when designing a product that is SUPPOSED to be stylized. There is nothing that screams “cheap” quite like using Arial on a product design. I fail to understand why anyone would deliberately choose to go with the boringest font for their product, but I realized recently… That they don’t choose it. A default font is rarely ever a choice, but rather, the lack thereof - and so, it not only screams “cheap”, it also screams “low effort”.
Monospace fonts are somewhat of a controversial topic in the world of font nerdistry. I’ve seen people dub Courier as the “worst font” quite a few times, which just doesn’t feel fair in a world where Jokerman exists. For some reason, monospace fonts have always endeared me. There is something just so charming and simple about them, but not so simple that it’s boring (*cough* Arial *cough*). Courier in particular, is so true to its vintage look that it’s almost kitschy. Inconsolata was my favorite font for many years, a font that maintains the general charming vibe of monospace fonts but without being hard to look at after a certain period of time. Even Roboto Mono, the most plain looking of the monospace family, still feels cozy in a hard to describe way.
My new favorite font: Fredoka. How could you not love it? It’s just SO DAMN CUTE. It’s rare to find a font that’s all round and bubbly but doesn’t sacrifice legibility. Also, there is a dingbat version of the font which is perfect for adding some accents to make a page prettier. Although I don’t plan on ever having children, if I ever do have a daughter, I’m naming her Fredoka. Now you know why.
Meme fonts, although not the prettiest or most sophisticated, hold a crucial role in society. If good art is art that evokes emotions within the viewer, then Comic Sans must be the Mona Lisa. There is no other font that people outside of the graphic design field would feel so strongly about. It’s horrible, it’s disgusting, it’s amazing, it’s hilarious. It’s HILARIOUS. I don’t know if I just have the humor of a toddler, but just seeing comic sans somewhere out of place is enough to make me giggle like an idiot. It’s like the visual equivalent of the Yakety Sax, there is nothing that manages to encapsulate the feeling of “goofy fun” quite like it. Its brother, Papyrus, is less intrinsically funny- still, it has a playful edge to it. I don’t think either of these fonts were ever designed to be taken seriously. The reason why they are so widely hated is most likely because of overexposure, thanks to every font-illiterate teacher and small business owner abusing their usage.
Impact, I would say also broadly falls into the category of a “meme font”, but it’s fallen out of use in recent times. There’s nothing really that funny about the way the font looks though, it just so happened that during the early 2010s, every meme creator decided to use Impact for their captions. Although that era of meme culture is over, whenever I see Impact my mind is immediately brought back to those cringy old memes with that dinosaur picture.
Now, I am no graphic designer, so feel free to not take any of my opinions seriously. However, I do have a couple of fonts that I… like less than the others. Amatic SC, for example, looks like chicken scratch from a distance. Sure, it’s a chicken with really neat handwriting, but still chicken scratch. Reading it physically hurts, and it’s not even that aesthetically pleasing… in my opinion. Maybe the reason I feel this way is because I survived the 2010s, back when this font was on every mug, tote bag, cookie jar, and whatever the hell else was being sold to millennials - And they ate that shit up. I never understood the appeal of the font, to me it reads as trying too hard to look quirky and relatable. In general, I also just dislike any font where it requires a strenuous amount of brain power to read.
This entry has gone on for long enough, so I’m gonna cap it off here. I could totally write a follow up entry about even more fonts, because there are so many I haven’t talked about yet. If you managed to make it this far into this read, then you have officially earned the title of a fellow font nerd, so wear it with pride. See ya later.