I’m placing this under the “Banned Design Elements” because it’s about a font, Akzidenz Grotesk, which is actually quite the opposite of Comic Sans and Papyrus.

Ps. I’m adding “Copperplate Gothic” and all its variants to the status of BANNED!

PPS. As long as we are on the subject of fonts (or at have been with this category), I would like to speak to the motive of banning fonts. Many designers, typographers, typesetters, and general nerds will have varying opinions about what makes a good font or what makes a bad font. Though some argue that the unholy trinity mentioned above are disgusting because if their over-use/abuse, one can argue that Univers, Aksidenz Grotesk, Helvetica (both the old and new versions), and to a lesser degree, Arial, are equally prevalent. The difference is that the unholy trinity of fonts is typically used by secretaries and assistant managers (along with tacky/distorted/pixelated clip art, multi-colored text, or basic text warping functions) to JAZZ-UP otherwise boring or passive-aggressive announcements.

The others, however, tend to represent the logos and graphic standards of companies such as Target, Apple, Lufthansa, the country of Canada, the letters on your keyboard, and other aesthetically pleasing thing on this earth.

In my experience, it all comes down to intent. Are you coming up with an image and strategy, then finding an appropriate font, and then adjusting the size, weight, spacing, and/or adding other graphic elements as needed? Or, are you typing out your name, and flipping through the 20 pre-installed fonts on your computer because you don’t want your logo in Times New Roman? I’ll admit that MAC users have it a bit easier when adopting this strategy, mostly because their font sets are designed to be more aesthetically pleasing. That doesn’t make the strategy okay, though.

Unless you have the ability to create a good logo, in a decent font, create print-friendly file formats (.ai, .eps, .tif, .pds and maybe some others), any money you save on the upside of logo creation, you will lose when paying someone to convert it to a print-ready file format. And do you really want to pay someone $65/hour to recreate a logo that was supposed to save you money? It may actually be cheaper to just get it done correctly the first time.