Ever since what some consider the worse font choice of all time, I’ve been wondering what makes certain fonts considered socially acceptable and taken seriously while *cough* Comic Sans *cough* others have been ostracized as unintelligible scribble.  My conclusion: ubiquity.  

It’s a little paradoxical, but essentially, once it has been pushed out to people through being the default choice of some influential decision makers, then it becomes legitimatized.

Times New Roman has earned itself a highly respected place in people’s minds — especially those of academics and serious intellects.  You would never turn in a paper or a college application personal statement in another font.  All this reverence because Microsoft chose to make it the default font as far back as Windows version 3.1.  Maybe it’s because it looks so serious with the feet and styling of the letters; however, I would conjecture it is because Office Word became the most ubiquitous word processing program in the 90s. Times New Roman then most ubiquitous font for documents.  Consequently, it became accepted as the only serious font.

Helvetica has become the “mainstream font” largely because designers for corporations and mass media adopted it.  I just saw a whole documentary on it (not surprisingly called Helvetica).  People say it doesn’t stand out because of its very clean look.  It is used by GAP, Crate and Barrel, and countless others (though you can see 40 great examples of logos with helvetica).  

Of course the initial clean design may have attracted large corporations to adopt it, but I do believe having it show up everywhere that these corporations sprout up has contributed to its ever growing ubiquity and popularity — and therefore acceptance as a legitimate font to use by people wanting to be taken seriously.

Calibri may soon gain acceptance as a serious font.  Not many of my Mac friends know it, but it’s actually the new default font for Microsoft products ever since Office 2007.  I personally love it.  Microsoft claimed that san serif fonts like Calibri are easier on the eyes when you have a lot of text which is all too common for documents made from Micorsoft products as well as the web now days since so much long-form content is being put up.  I hope Calibri catches on but I do wonder if academics will ever accept it as a serious font with the same august that Times New Roman presently enjoys.

While I doubt Papyrus (or Comic Sans for that matter) will catch on anytime soon even with the occasional cameo is blockbuster films, I do wonder what the next big fonts will look like.  The folks at typekit may be the first to know if their startup takes off and designers adopt their tool kit.  Browsers now support the ability to use different fonts while previously, you had to put stylized fonts in images or flash; however, there are a lot of rights issues around fonts and Typekit has effectively streamlined the process to a point where you just pay Typekit a small fee to gain access to rich library of fonts.  I wonder if they have interesting data on what web publishers are using outside of the normal arial, verdana, and helvetica fonts.  This may give an indication of what’s the next big font based on trending adoption.

I suspect however that the adoption of a font as the default choice by Google docs or The New York Times could be all it takes to legitimize it.