Both of these have more to do with lazy humans than with computers - so please, take me off any Luddite mailing lists you might just have added me to, thank you.
Onward:
1. The same damned cheesy fonts everywhichwhere. Once upon a time, your small-business owner who didn't have a whole bunch of money to hire an expensive graphic artist, but who needed a sign, could probably still afford to hire a sign painter - or take the DIY approach. While the quality of the resulting work would obviously vary, at least the results (even if the business owner was a lame-ass letterer) would be distinctive, not the same cookie-cutter set of fonts now available to any business owner who can afford a computer.
2. Pixelation. This results when dull humans blow up a low-res image to a scale it was never intended to be viewed at. Quite often, there's probably a higher-res version available - but you know, you can just blow it up, and hey who'll notice that it looks like crap? Other than anyone with eyes, that is.
The upside of this is it's easy to tell the level of damn-giving a business (or individual) has. Papyrus font, pixelated graphics (especially if they're clip-art of the lamest sort), and a handful of missing or misplaced apostrophes: either the folks who put this together just don't care, or they're so insensitive to the effect that whatever they're selling, you can be sure they're not paying attention to quality there, either.
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2 comments:
All Mexican restaurants now use the same cheesy jalepeno type of lettering in their storefront window.
And your rant doesn't explain the pre-computer ubiquitousness of Helvetica.
And of course there's the "Asian" fonts...and the "Celtic" ones... Good point about Helvetica...but I don't need to talk about it, since there's a movie that already does so! But I think that Helvetica has a certain genericness to it: it simply became the sans serif font, and non-designers (or non- font freaks) probably don't distinguish it from any other sans serif font. Whereas things like Papyrus, Mistral, Comic Sans, etc., pretend to be distinctive not just to designers - which makes their ubiquity all the more annoying.
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