My continual education pursuits have me making a weekly trek by car into downtown Toronto. Usually, I take the infamous Gardiner Expressway, but the highway and surrounding infrastructure is in such a sad state of disrepair, that the city has started a massive summer long rehabilitation project on the roadway. So, I ended up taking Queen Street into the downtown core. Driving downtown, is a lot different than driving out in the suburbs. For one, the latter is virtually desolate of pedestrians, cyclists and joggers. So if you’re driving downtown, there’s certainly a lot more to keep your eye on. And the other day, my wandering eyes spent a small amount of time looking at the various storefront signage littering the Queen Street landscape.

Many of the Queen Street storefronts, especially new shops to the scene, have their marketing in order. If you’re going to open up a shop selling anything on this stretch of the street you better have your branding in the right place. And obviously, part of a good exercise in advertising is selecting the right mixture of fonts and colours for the brand you’re trying to develop. In any case, it was very easy to spot the marketing have, and have not’s along Queen Street, and in many cases, all you had to do is look what kind of fonts were used on the various signage, which used everything from serif to script, Times Roman to Helvetica. Occasionally, bad choices of fonts did creep up, and some of these made my list of top five fonts to avoid in any kind of design:

A much overused font that owes its popularity due to the fact it has been bundled in pretty much every release of Microsoft Windows. It is a sans-serif typeface that is defined by very thick strokes and compressed letter spacing. It was mainly intended for headlines, and has found very strong support for usage in Image Macros. For this sole reason, as the interenets catz sez dat Impact deserves a fail.

Courier is classified as a monofaced slab serif typeface. Its monofaced properties make it good for certain things such as displaying code, and that’s about the gamut of its application. If you don’t want your messages to sound like Robot B9 from Lost in Space, or mimic an old typewriter, you’ll want to avoid this typeface in any kind of design.

You’ve seen this one. On bottles of iced tea, James Cameron’s movie Avatar, and the invitation your cousin sent you for his wedding, but you forgot to attend. Created in 1982 by graphic artist Chris Costello, Papyrus’ downfall is its popularity among fly by night graphic designers. If you want to keep tabs on this font, the website Papyrus Watch keeps an eye on its usage in various media. Definitely worth a visit.

I’m sure you’ve seen this one hanging out on the street front signage at your local neighbourhood pub whose decor hasn’t been updated since the 1980’s. Or maybe you’ve seen it as a slogan for that grimy corner auto mechanic, that prides itself on being “first in service”. Brush Script usage peaked over a decade ago, however it still creeps up occasionally in various advertising mediums, that being said, its a very dated looking font, so don’t bother using it.

Have you ever experienced a message in which the font makes you feel like it was written by a character out of Toy Story? How about someone from Roger Rabbit? Comic Sans MS is that font. Originally designed to mimic comic book lettering, Comic Sans MS is probably the most hated font by professional graphic designers.  It’s often found lurking in corporate e-mail communications, either as the main body font, or for an even worse mishmash, an e-mail signature. Probably the most offending application for this font is using it for displaying rather serious messages. I mean would you take any message or warning sign seriously that was written in this font? For this type of application, Impact is an infinitely better choice. IT departments should create firewall rules in order to remove this font automatically from all inbound and outbound data traffic. Companies should have  policies in place explicitly banning its usage. It should be classified as high security risk due to its potentially comical, yet lobotomic effects on employees. There have been countless of websites dedicated against the usage of this font, with Ban Comic Sans being the most popular one out there. For more examples of how inappropriately Comic Sans is used, visit the SixRevisions Comic Sans blog post by Cameron Chapman. College Humour also did some rather funny short videos on a Font Conference, as well as a Font Fight, with Comic Sans making an appearance at the end of both videos. Worth a watch.