This week at work our proprietary software got an overhaul. The changes are all for the better, all to make our jobs easier but man, they take some getting used to.One of the main ‘upgrades’ was to a basic client-specific form that we print out for every job that we do. Some fields were changed, some removed and the ‘notes’ at the bottom are now in Courier New (it looks like 10pt) - they used to be in Arial.

Now, moving from a sans-serif font to serif is kind of a step backwards since Courier seems so primitive and bland. To quote the geeks in JPod by Douglas Coupland: “Documents are thirty four percent more boring when presented in the courier font.” [jPod] [Coupland]

I decided to Google around and see if I could come up with some interesting Courier arguments. I came across this article from 2004: “As of February 1, 2004, the standard typeface for all official State Department correspondence is to be set in New Times Roman 14, reported the Associated Press.” [AIGA] I was immediately sucked into this analytical and completely geeky discussion/debate and it made me laugh. This is exactly what I was looking for.

I continued the font-discussion-search and came across another article/post about the influence of fonts: &#82