Ew: TNR (Nov. 3,4,5)

Have I ever expressed my distaste for the font Times New Roman. If i haven't before thenI shall gladly tell you now. When I got my first computer in the mid 90s, I was about (how old are you in 5th grade?) 9 or 10 years old. It was a "Hewlett Packard", beige coloured with a big monstrosity of a monitor and a CPU that probably weighed the same amount as me at the time. I have very fond memories of my first computer. It was loaded with awesome games like Sonic the Hedgehog, Ecco, the dolphin game, and this one CD-ROM game called POD, which was a car racing game that I was really bad at, among others. I would spend hours and hours entertaining myself with the Paint program, creating pictures to go with the storyboard in my head. It also contained my first introduction to the wonderful world of Maxis, with the original SimCity. Anyways, this isn't the point.

So, of course, when book reports and article reviews would get assigned in class I would jump at the chance to type them on Microsoft Word, (I think it was Edition 95 or something). I loved typing. I had no basic training, but still I would sit at the computer for hours and type lists of things that I didn't really need, just for the sake of hearing the click click click of the keyboard. I went as far as to make a list of all the pokemon I had "encountered" on the cartoon. It was then that I learned what a "font" was, and that not everything had to be as boring as Times New Roman.

You see, I never considered the actual styling of letters and here was this option that allowed me to change my "font" to any cool design and feature that pleased me. I was ecstatic. In comparison, all the other fonts by far surpassed Times New Roman in coolness factor. Times New Roman reminded me of newspaper. Newspaper that had been yellowed with age and made coarse. Or an old crotchety dude. It was boring. It added no pizazz to an assignment and it made me feel generic and inordinary. Is it "in" or "un" - ordinary? I unno. I think its "un". Anyway, to this day, I really really loathe the font on syllabi, articles, and forms. It shows me that the person who typed it cared very little to give the paper a little more personality, to attract the reader. I prefer fonts like Arial, and Helvetica, all the sans serif stuff. Comic Sans was also deffo a favourite of my early youth.

Today, even on my blackberry, the font is "casual" something or other, but I guess my issues with fonts says more about me than about the fonts themselves.