Fun:Papyrus
Fun:Papyrus[edit]
| Dolphins and Money New Age |
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| Cosmic concepts |
| Spiritual selections |
“”I am a glass-blowing artist and in my 'Hidden Worlds' show, I hand engraved scenes which had hidden worlds of animals in the tree branches. I tried several different fonts but thought this font tied the material together and gave me the feeling I was hoping for.
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| —Lisa Tate[1] |
“”What the fuck is this shit?
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| —RationalWiki editors |
The Papyrus typeface is used by New Agers as a secret sign to identify each other, much as gays use rainbows and nurseries use Comic Sans.
Origin story[edit]
The typeface was created by graphic designer Chris Costello for Letraset in 1982. He is very sorry.[1]
Further developments[edit]
Papyrus is popular with the New Age movement because it provides a feeling of natural creation and hand-crafting, mass produced by computer in a sterile environment.
Papyrus is also frequently found on Christian rock CDs and suburban church notices,[2] to give that proper feeling of being spiritual, yet safe. (It was also used for the back cover of "Killed By Death" by Motörhead, though that was only a couple of years after its invention.[3])
Papyrus was famously used for the subtitles in Avatar, finally proving the cosmic oneness of blue-skinned cat babes with "athletic breasts".[4]
Papyrus was used for the name of the spaceship Serenity (in the movie of the same name), which was a sequel to the cult classic TV show Firefly. Presumably, the forced use of this terrible fontface indicated how Orwellian the oppressive interstellar government of Firefly had become.
Papyrus is also the name of a not-so-stupid sapient skeleton in Undertale, who in addition to speaking in papyrus also speaks in all caps. And if that's not bad enough, his brother is named Sans and speaks in Comic Sans.[5]
Although the Papyrus font is by now a mostly discredited font as of 2019, its meaning killed by those who abused that font to evoke natural creation and hand-crafting, that doesn't mean the concept this font represents is dead -- it has merely been superseded by more recent "hand-painted paintbrush fonts", such as Amatic[6] or Westfalia,[7] that capture the same feeling in a mass-produced computer font.
Societal flaws[edit]
Font snobs hold it in even lower general esteem than Comic Sans. We've all had business memos in Comic Sans, but only a terminal crystal-hugger would request your overdue TPS reports using Papyrus. Comic Sans says "dumb"; Papyrus says "space cadet."
See also[edit]
External links[edit]
- The Wikipedia talk page is hilarious. (Yeah, xkcd is all they have to say about Papyrus.[8])
- Sans Fight Animation
- Amatic SC, a successor of Papyrus
- Westfalia, another Papyrus successor
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 F is for font: Investigating Boise's love affair with the prolific Papyrus (Travis Estvold, Boise Weekly, 2008-06-25)
- ↑ Pentecostal ones use Comic Sans.
- ↑ https://www.discogs.com/release/5271467-Killed-By-Death/images
- ↑ http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=124320235
- ↑ NYEH HEH HEH!
- ↑ https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Amatic+SC
- ↑ https://www.behance.net/gallery/44666325/WESTFALIA-FREE-FONT
- ↑ The xkcd comic in question