Why is it that everyone and their mother is so infatuated with Trebuchet? I’ll admit that I’ve been through a period where I thought Trebuchet was pretty cool. That was back when Kubrick was pretty cool too. We all know what happened with that.

Update with pictures!

Now I’m not saying that Trebuchet is necessarily a bad font. It has its uses. It works quite nicely as a header font. Where it does not work is when people try to use it like Verdana. Paragraphs set in Trebuchet are awful. What’s even worse is when people take the size down like they do with Verdana. News flash: Verdana is legible at small sizes, Trebuchet is not. You thought 10px Verdana was bad? 10px Trebuchet is like shoving freshly charged batteries into your eyes. Have a look:

The other thing is that Trebuchet is just awful when it’s printed. Blogger happened to choose that font and now everyone who has a blogger blog happens to use it everywhere. Outlines, essays, flyers, you name it. Unless Trebuchet is at the right size, it just doesn’t look appealing. It bugs me when I walk onto a TTC bus and see a The Source ad. Why? Because the words are huge and it’s Trebuchet. It also bugs me in Winners. And it bugged me when i saw that ‘Our Journey’ devo that used to be Soul Journey.

I have no doubt that the fine folks at RBC changed the design of SJ to better reflect the technologically savvy, blogging students that are their intended audience by choosing the ‘blog’ font. Soul Journey looked nice. Then they just took it and slapped the huge Trebuchet title on it. It looks oddly reminiscent of something Microsoft-y.

So it seems Trebuchet is the new Arial. Don’t get me started on that one.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 21st, 2005 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.