It doesn’t take much in life to make me happy.
I have always been a font nerd. Just incredibly so. It started with newspapers, and not even with reading them myself. When I was a teenager, one of my dad’s contributions to our church was to make a big sign for it. Not like cardboard… like a huge logo built onto the side of a stone wall, or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it was made of, but I do remember the conversation before it was constructed.
He said that if we were going to advertise the church, the font didn’t need to be readable when you were standing in front of the church. It needed to be visible when you were driving down the road at 35 mile an hour.
And it’s not just one thing, but it is another story about my family. I have no proof of this, but my feeling about it is that my love of fonts started with my grandfather, Mayo.
Both of my grandfathers worked at Lone Star Steel for their entire careers. My mother’s father was a computer geek (this has no bearing on my current situation). I also think I may have inherited his autism, but I am not basing that on a diagnosis and it may be complete bullshit. I just observed him for years.
He, like me, ate about five things. (I’m a pro cook, but I don’t do it for myself. As a writer, I like consistency as not to interrupt my flow.)
He, like me, was the first in the family to adopt computers as a career…. except he was more high-level than I was. Not only did he do projects for NASA at Lone Star Steel, he would have been (I think, not 100% certain) the modern day equivalent of a systems administrator. The things that I recall that happened to my mother, aunts, and uncles back me up on this, because in retrospect it really seems like he was a neurodivergent struggling in a neurotypical world (which also has no bearing on my current situation, clearly). Not only did we have the connection of me being his first grandchild out of many, he could see me. For instance, literally no one around me knew how to tutor me in Algebra except him.
My father’s father was the public relations man for the whole company. He wrote like a journalist, he took pictures like a journalist. Probably neurodivergent and struggling as well, because genetics and past history in terms of observation.
I started with a tangent on my maternal grandfather before getting to the story because I am an interesting mix of both of them. I have my father’s father’s widow’s peak and my mother’s father’s nose. My dad attested to this in the video the other day…. “she’s got my face.” I assume he got it from somewhere. I don’t know whether me being genderqueer makes me notice it more, or whether it’s objectively true, but I find myself in them more than any other family member. Put together, I look an amazing amount like my dad’s littlest sister….. but inside, I’m both of them down to their careers. Not only do I use linux, I’ve got the skills of a PR man to make documentation and linux evangelism come alive on the page. It’s such a drag to read boring documentation and comments in the code, and every one of us knows it. So far, the best comment I’ve gotten when I’ve installed a package is “not guaranteed not to kill puppies and steal your women.” It was bleeding edge, and the reason it’s funny is that linux isn’t corporate and doesn’t have to conform to Microsoft bullshit. I would have a lot more fun working with developers on Launchpad than I would ever get out of Seattle……. because I could say things like “if you install this on a live server first, God have mercy on your soul.”
Where fonts come in is that coders are persnickety about the fonts used in the code editor (ironically enough, I prefer Microsoft Visual Studio Code because it’s every bit as good as Notepad++ and will run natively. Most coders use some version of the same font. It will look llike Verdana with a few notable exceptions. The first thing is that monospace type means exactly what it says. Every letter takes up the same amount of room. This is important when looking at coding because it’s so much easier on your eyes. In the newspaper business, they don’t do that because they’re not looking at the same thing. They don’t have to read the code between the content.
In an office suite and with coding, for me it’s Droid for everything- sans, serif, and mono. Not only do I just like them, it looks better for documents to always use a complete family of fonts rather than picking them out piecemeal. You can, it’s just easier on the eyes because then the spaces between the fonts look the same…… except for Droid Sans Mono. We have covered this.
If you’re an Android user, you’re used to the Droid font family because it’s the same one used on your phone. It makes it easier on your eyes due to looking at it all day.
Editor’s Note: “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face” from “My Fair Lady” is playing in my head right now as the designation below font familiy is font face.
The only thing that ever wins over Droid Sans is Helvetica…. that’s because it’s hard to find if you’re not an Apple user, because Apple actuallly bought it for distribution and Windows didn’t. They made up their own knockoff called “Arial,” and if they’d followed Steve’s advice to focus on design, they would have bought it, too, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. In case you didn’t think Helvetica is worth serious money, there’s a whole ass documentary by the same name. Helvetica is everywhere you look. Everywhere. I once bought a copy of Helvetica at Goodwill and a whole ass Mac came with it. Buying a Mac at Goodwill was on purpose. The first is that it would be old as shit. More like a glorified typewriter. The second is that it didn’t even have a wireless card in it, so I wouldn’t be tempted at Starbucks.
When I go to Starbucks, I’m there to play for keeps. I am going to get something out of this writing session if it’s the last thing I do. “Getting something out of a writing session” is relative. Sometimes it’s that I can judge whether my writing is better or worse. Sometimes I realize that even if it’s six pages of bullshit and four wide margins, I still worked out. Writing is a muscle, and you’re strengthening your core.
I am just saying both my grandfathers have taught me a lot about what it takes to be a computer geek and a writer who focuses on art. A lot about what it takes to be neurodivergent in a neurotypical world…. particularly with my father’s father, I feel like a resurrection now that he’s dead. I am certain my father would say that, too, because he’s observed us together his whole life. I, just like him, have leapt in my bedroom to escape all the peopling. Everyone else just worked around us. Now that I’m older and I’m looking at his life in retrospect, the things that seemed weird about him when I was a kid are the exact same things that are making me weird now.
I am dying laughing thinking about how tears will roll down his face at that line. How tears would have rolled down my mother’s, aunts,and uncles’ face as well because I have just revealed the fact that I have both their dad’s numbers because I are them.
“All lesbians have this straight guy side to them…….” -me
Through my father’s father, I know that I have found both of my beloveds in this life, and they are to me. Invaluable and precious just like my grandmother was.
So, when I think about my personality, I am my dad on the inside and my mom on the outside in my behavior and actions. I think like a man, I look like a woman. This isn’t problematic to me because I’ve solved the mystery because now I have a word like nonbinary, where that disconnect doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. I named it and claimed it, sister.
Although I know my first and ony thought at the first sign of breast cancer means rip them both off immediately, because what I saw when I saw Tig Notaro is that it didn’t make her look any less feminine than she did before and my shirts would hang right.
I say this not to say that I’d have top surgery on purpose because I feel I was born in the wrong body. I just know I won’t struggle with body issues afterwards because you cannot even guess how little it would bother me to look male to some people. My mind is big enough to accept that I contain multitudes and no answer is easy…. why most people think I’m the most intense personality they’ve ever met because when they tell me they have a problem, I say, “do you want some advice, or did you just want to vent?” If they say that they’d like advice, I will go Griffin from MiBIII on their asses. I can “if, then” my way through an emotional situation like a doctor, and I do that because of my dad. He left the ministry to pursue a career in medicine and my stepmother is a rheumatologist. They got married and we lived together when I was young enough to pick up their patois quickly and easily. I get lost in a psychological H&P.
So, to get back to what I was saying about fonts, I know what to use and when because I have all the use case scenarios where you have to make readability a priority, and that comes from my dad, too. He preached about it. He said, “when Kennedy was assasinated, it said, ‘Kennedy Shot!’ in about 80pt font. When Jessica (llittlle girl that got trapped in a well) got rescued, the newspaper said, ‘Jessica Safe!’ in about 80pt font.” I don’t remember the sermon verbatim, but it centered on the ways in which bad and good news is delivered. Perhaps it was that you can only control what you broadcast, not what you take in.
When broadcasting your good news, it helps to make readability a priority.
Stories That Are All True 