Why did Avatar use Papyrus font for the logo? James Cameron Explained!

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In Defense of Papyrus: Avatar Uses the World’s Second-Most-Hated Font to Signal the Downfall of Civilization
When Ryan Gosling’s SNL skit debuted, I thought it was as hilarious as anyone else. Nevermind that – as a former type snob – it felt as if the skit was poking fun at me, personally.

In “Papyrus,” Gosling plays a graphic designer who is tormented by the fact that the Papyrus font was used for the logo for the blockbuster movie, Avatar.

But along with this skit came a flood of request for me to break down just what was so bad about the Papyrus font.

Strap in, this is a long one. If you’d rather read this on your favorite e-reader, buy In Defense of Papyrus on Kindle and many other outlets.

I reluctantly spent a year investigating Papyrus. And what I discovered shook my world.
You see, I have a bit of a past with notorious fonts. My post, “Why You Hate Comic Sans,” consistently ranks as one of the top results for Google searches for “comic sans.”

I told myself that I had retired from the world of font snobbery. I had said what I wanted to say in one book about typography. I had moved on to other things.

But like Gosling’s character in the skit, I couldn’t shake what I had seen.

NBCUniversal
It’s one thing for Papyrus to be used on the sign of a strip-mall bakery. It’s another thing entirely for it to be used to represent what would become the top-grossing movie of all time.

So, I set about the arduous task of breaking down Why You Hate Papyrus. I spent over a year writing a novel’s worth of words trying to untangle the mess. (I wish I was kidding.) I’ve edited it down to this long blog post.

There were things I learned about Papyrus that deepened my dislike of the font, but there were other things that helped me appreciate it.

The most surprising finding of all was that Papyrus could potentially be the perfect font for the film Avatar. And no, not necessarily because of any aesthetic quality the font has.

I believe that James Cameron’s use of Papyrus was an artistic choice. One that sends an important message about the potential downfall of civilization.

The surprisingly solid typographic fundamentals of Papyrus
To start off, let’s look at Papyrus’s fundamentals as a typeface. If it’s so hated, clearly it must be lacking in fundamentals. Surprisingly, I didn’t find this to be true.

If Papyrus is the second-most hated font, next to Comic Sans, it makes sense to define Papyrus’s “bad”-ness in comparison with Comic Sans. So, I set out to compare and contrast the qualities of Comic Sans and Papyrus with the qualities of the most beloved typeface – Garamond.

Here I’ve set blocks of body copy in Papyrus, Garamond, and Comic Sans. Keep in mind that Papyrus is what you would call a “display” font, which means it was never intended to be used in blocks of body copy in the first place – not that that has stopped anyone from using it for their term paper on ancient Mesopotamian economics.

Even though Papyrus is a display font, seeing it set in body copy still helps us analyze how well it balances visual weight.

Papyrus has an even “texture”
One of the most important fundamentals by which to analyze a typeface is that of texture. I don’t mean the “texture” in the sense of the various nicks or scratches on the edges of Papyrus letters. Instead, I mean the “texture” of an overall block of text set in Papyrus.

Letters do the job of conveying language. Each letter is inherently different from other letters. For example, an “x” is totally different from an “i.” That’s the very basis of letters.

If letters didn’t differ from one another, we wouldn’t be able to read them and get information from them. A good typeface lets those inherent differences between letters shine through, while maintaining harmony between all of the letters.

So when you set a block of text in a given typeface, that block of text should have an overall even texture. An even texture indicates that the visual weights of the individual letters are well-balanced. Thus, the inherent differences between the letters shine through, rather than those inherent differences being muddied by haphazard variations.

Trying to read a font that doesn’t present an even texture is like trying to listen to a symphony with a jackhammer sporadically pounding in the orchestra pit.

Here’s that same sample, again.

These blocks of text look very different from one another, and these differences don’t necessarily mean that one typeface has a better texture than another.

Papyrus is the lightest and roughest of them all – like the pumice rock you might find next to an active Hawaiian volcano – because Papyrus has very large counters (the spaces within letters, such as within the “o”). On the other hand, Comic Sans is very dark, since it has such wide strokes.

#jamescameron #avatar #thewayofwater

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“Well whatever they did, IT WAS NOT ENOUGH!” lol

awake

This will likely get more play because of the sequel sketch last night.

luisrizo

Pretty sure Ryan Gosling has a video that blames the art department for just being lazy. Most likely, it was a filler font until they "found something better" and they just never did.

joelwillems