I've been doing a lot of design work lately and thinking about the minority of usable fonts (yeah I know the real heads call them typefaces). I'll start:

Awful
Comic sans- I have a sweet coworker who emails this garbage
Papyrus- Steven King used it on a book cover, James Cameron used it for Avatar and it looks like a Creed album.

Usable
Georgia
Helvetica
Times New Roman
Palatino
Arial
Impact (surprisingly useful in non xhardcorex applications, especially for smaller text that needs to be legible)


I'm currently on the fence about American Typewriter, I never use it cause it looks like comic sans for people who prefer film photography.

Trump banned Calibri so it's S-tier by default

Eww, Comic Sans..

For various reasons, I use Arial and Courier (New) the most often.

(GAY FURRY BRAIN ON FIRE) HEY WHAT’S WRONG WITH PAPYRUS?

I would actually swap a couple of those fonts, or put them in new categories.

Comics Sans might be the most awesome bad font. One of the funniest usage I’ve seen was on the CNN report on Mark Robinson, the insane transphobic/homophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, MAGA lunatic who was the 2024 GOP gubernatorial candidate for North Carolina. Robinson used to post frequently on message boards, so while I don’t know if this was CNN’s decision or if it was the forum’s settings, his moronic posts were screencapped with Comic Sans. Just amazing.

I rate Impact as an ugly font because I heavily associated with dated 4chan image macro memes that boomers still use. As a result, every time I look at any image using Impact font, my mind is set to immediately ignore.

Helvetica became an interesting slightly nostalgic ugly font to me. Even though it’s an obvious alright looking ordinary font, William Bennett (of Whitehouse) wrote quite a lot about the Helvetica font after watching the documentary, Helvetica. After I read a couple of his rants back in the day, I too eventually began to notice Helvetica was everywhere. Helvetica became kinda like how Impact was used for image macro meme “humor” but for late 2000s–early 2010s hipster-to-meainstream culture. While I didn’t hate it as William Bennett does (I look at it a bit fondly now for me in-my-20s nostalgia), Helvetica’s ubiquity did really made it look like everything was owned by American Apparel graphic designers.

^ Nice. Yes the ubiquity of Helvetica has definitely been a thing. I blame a shortage of decent fonts.

jfv wrote: For various reasons, I use Arial and Courier (New) the most often.

Oh yeah, Courier is another sturdy sans serif.

I also forgot Verdana on my list of non-stinkers.

Courier has massive serifs!
Arial disgusts me since it was changed (awkwardly) so MS didn't have to license Helvetica, whereas Apple just ponied up for the properly designed original.
If you're looking for humanist grotesques (the class to which Helvetica belongs) there are a lot of great ones - Univers, Frutiger, Akzidenz Grotesk, and the lord of them all, Haas Unica.
Other classic sans - Futura, Gill Sans (altho Gill was a pretty disgusting and abusive creep), Optima.
And not to completely bash MS, the new Aptos default typeface for their office suite is pretty beautiful.

matttkkkk wrote: Sun Dec 28, 2025 6:20 pm Courier has massive serifs!

Oh yeah, those are just little platforms to keep them from falling over.

Indeed! Among the monospace ones I like SF Mono enough to use it for all my terminals.

I like Futura a bunch. Very Vaughn Oliver-looking.

Compacta is a good one, too. Very readable when space is a bit tight.

I use Josefin Sans a lot, I guess I like it.