re: avatar and the papyrus; my typo prof @geotypografika basically says it better than I could've: "fucking fuck." http://bit.ly/58yIKj

Fresh snow here last night, Colin. Thanks for this story, it underscores the point that they must have had an inkling, even well before your friends email, and had decided it was appropriate. More power to ’em, I suppose. I wonder though, given the global typographic outrage over the IKEA font change, where is the response from our community now?

You are killing me, Joe! :-) I’ve asked that same question for years.

Erik,

I know of no snow but yo snow, I follow weather here and there! (Pathetic perhaps). But I had to return to this conversation because I just had a meeting that turned into drinks, where the Avatar papyrus convo came up, which tangented into the Ikea Verdana debate. It was decided that given the internet’s propensity for turning mundane gossip and tid-bits into snowballing mega-trends, the most genius approach is to capitalize on this viral activity. Intentional faux-pas…. that said, we think James saw papyrus on the script cover and became immediately attached, nothing could deter him.

Papyrus is something that seems to function for society at large. It is used over and over again for similar things. Its the default for expressing tribal cultures amongst so many other things. Its sad but what is more depressing is that it’s used continuously. I know I am not saying anything new here but its true. This typeface is used to compare ancient/tribal cultures and now it seems to represent many things in American culture. Its comparable to Entertainment and advertising culture that is not concerned with good promotional design, or more specifically poster design. Its all the cut corners that make a poster design now, especially in entertainment, and Papyrus is one of many things that reflect half ass effort, at least when it comes to people who should know better, such as avatar design people.

The first thing I thought of, back when I first started thinking about this, was that James Cameron had that font in his library and decided that because he had the set of fonts he did, that they were the most universal, best, most good fonts of all the fonts, and that getting something else would be deterring from the art. The art being the film. Like people choosing a standard size for a poster, or deciding to have your CD put in stores in the standard jewel case.

But no matter how much I want to believe that the creators of this film simply did not want to or did not know that they should go there, make that effort with the titles and such, it does come back to two things for me: 1. they used it for the subtitles, which sort of wrecks the idea I had that they just wanted to remain standard. 2. At the end of the film, the title is stretched to fill the screen.

Someone let someone be very irresponsible.

Considering the story line being that of Pocahontas (sorry guys, never seen Dances With Wolves. I saw Grandmother Willow in Avatar, and I’m pretty sure Dances With Wolves didn’t have Grandmother Willow.), and an insane lack of swearing, ie: an expensive film made for both children and adults, I’d like to think they were aiming the font more towards a child-recognizable one (while, y’know, outraging certain adults for no *good* reason). Kids are now going to recognize that font as the Avatar font, whether they can read or not. You’ve only got one shot with adults, and nowadays that shot’s mostly used up in Who’s Got Best Graphics (Avatar’s got that, so adults are taken care of). Now they’ve got a font that, whenever a five year old sees it, in regards to Avatar or not, will subliminally (or perhaps not so subliminally?) think, “Avatar! Mommy, I want Avatar for my birthday! Daddy, will you buy me an Avatar stuffed animal? Santa, can I have some Avatar toys for Christmas?”

And guess what? Kids are going to get their super-cool Avatar lunch boxes when they go back to school! Everyone ELSE has one…

Every damned one of them is going to have Papyrus on it.