Signs: some no-nos

Many, many fine creators in SL make amazing, beautiful things. Alas, some of them proceed to detract from their wonders with bad signage.

Sometimes, signs are set to glow so brightly that it's impossible to tell just what is being displayed. Eep!

Then there's font choice. There are two eras that are sort of the armpits of typography.

• One, I am sad to say, is the Victorian era, laden with insanely condensed or extended slab-serif type faces, usually outrageously bold. I don't understand why an era with such beautiful architecture, art, and clothing gave rise to such tacky typography. (And I'm happy that places like Caledon tend to deviate from accuracy in this regard.)
  
• The other is the era of "grunge typography" and the "Legibility? We don't need no steenkin' legibility!" approach of Ray Gun and the early issues of Wired. Yes, using a tagger font makes you too cool for words--literally. Just ask yourself: if I didn't know what this said, could I read it?

Also, Comic Sans must die. 'Nuff said.

While we're at it, let's kill off Black Chancery, too. It's a ghastly un-tilted calligraphic font, with "a", "g", and "q" that look like ink-blob accidents and horrid, hard to read upper case (is that an "L" or just a very swashy "I"?). If you want to use a calligraphic face, I very much regret that Zapf Chancery Cursive is overused, and urge you to consider the lovely and legible Insula instead.

Then there's the "when good fonts go bad" situation, in which someone sets a display face in all caps.


I regret that I don't have a blackletter face handy, as that's what I see most often abused this way IRL on the back windows of trucks and vans.

Finally, there's spelling. I understand that many residents' native language is not English, and I make a point of not letting typos color my opinion of the product, but... it's a needless distraction from the thing you've put so much of your time, effort, and self into. I IM vendors and creators to mention typos privately, pointing out that it's a shame that an easy-to-fix oversight takes attention away from a wonderful product.

The vast majority of signs and posters for SL products are works of art; I hope that eventually they all will be.