It is a well established fact that the average Christian uses 32% more exclamation points in their emails than Atheists. It’s not that we’re more excitable than other people, just that once we start capitalizing He and You and other references to God we start getting a little crazy with our punctuation too!!!
That’s not what I want to talk about today though. What I want to address are the 7 official rules of church fonts. Having recently experienced quite a few in my travels to promote the book Stuff Christians Like
The 7 Rules of Church Fonts
1. If you are doing a sermon or series on the Old Testament, you have to use Papyrus, that ancient feeling font. This is the Gandalf of all fonts.
2. If you are doing anything related to the youth group, you must use “Comic Sans.” Come on, it says, “Comic” right there in the title. This is the Spuds MacKenzie of fonts.
3. An image of an eagle, dove, or bough of olive branches can be used to punctuate a sentence.
4. If you have a “t” in a word and you don’t turn it into a cross, I hope you enjoy your visit to hades. It’s going to be a hot one my friend. And not a dry heat.
5. Always remember, “Where ten or more different fonts are gathered in one bulletin, there God will be as well.” Don’t be afraid to use every font you own all at once.
6. Don’t worry about getting pulled over for a BUI. Bold, Underlined and Italicized! You want something to “pop,” you better BUI like there is no tomorrow.
7. When in doubt, trust the Holiest, most important online font a human has access to, the flaming letters of importance. (I feel like this should be the official font of satan, but I swear lots of Christian sites apparently like it hot, hot, hot!
Those are my rules when it comes to church fonts.
Which ones did I miss? What are your faithtastic favorite fonts? Am I the only one who notices fonts?
I am so blessed to be part of a church with EXCELLENT promotional material/brochures etc… amazing!!
no over use of the word "awesome", not bad fonts, great use of church news…
It makes me smile 🙂
I am guilty of all of the above…. I create the sermon series logos at my church.
I've also used worship eagles on video with the song "Everlasting God" during the guitar solo.
The font world is responding to our plight. You can actually get a font called Christian Crew…. too funny… it includes doves, doves with olive branches, crosses, and Jesus' face.
I don't think it's a true Christian font though…. you can still type 666 when using it.
There is nothing more distracting from the message than a bad use of fonts. It's like your minister wearing a pink leisure suit. I strongly believe Jesus would use Helvetica for everything.
For youth I LOVE(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! – yes parenthetical overuse of punctuation)
Birth of A Hero!
It's amazing what a little helvetica and futura can do for the eye if used properly. We are always taught as a rule of thumb, use the least amount of typefaces as possible. 2 at the most. Papyrus makes me cringe.
It's gotta be Gill Sans for me. Every time.
And of course this gets me into trouble with the (admittedly small number of) fundies who know anything about Eric Gill and what he liked to do in his spare time…
Bleeding Cowboys is making a run for it in the edgy, angst-filled set.
I'm all about fonts but I'm finding that minimalistic seems to convey quite a bit more than the gaudy. Bank Gothic is a good one…I actually like Calibri…but more often than not, I use Georgia or Bookman Old Style.
Can we get a ruling on Tempus Sans? I actually like it, but I fear it's going the way of Papyrus.
What a great post. It is so fun to read comments from other people who notice and care about fonts. 🙂
I certainly would cast my vote in an effort to ban Comic Sans. Yuck.
All the relevant christians are using century gothic now
Maybe all church secretaries should be forced to watch this:
http://www.helveticafilm.com/
In my Childern's Ministry class, we were taught to use a font similar to Comic Sans because it makes the "a" how the kids learn to write it. Thankfully there are MANY other fonts out there that don't make their a's like we see them in this comment!
Many of the products I've worked on have used Avant Garde for that very reason, especially those materials for kids in first or second grade to read.
I agree — the wide variety of fonts does need to be explored and used. 🙂
I was "so over" Papyrus by the end of production of Mount Extreme when I worked on the VBS project team (wow, was that 12 years ago??!!??). To this day, I can spot it more easily than almost any other font.
Now I'm partial to the ones my products use the most: Myriad Pro and Minion Pro. Reliable, readable fonts with lots of style choices. w00t!
is this blog just a ripoff of Stuff White People Like? I've never seen this blog before but I don't want to waste my time if it sucks. I came here searching for these rules I heard about on Spirit FM in Tampa.
Mistrel is also an infamous font.
Also, watch out for Marydale—a handwritten font that communicates a casualness.
This is SO hilarious! I'm crying I'm laughing so hard!
Wow… this was a horrible post… I disagree with about 90% of what you had to say. I'm well aware that you did this for fun, but on the off chance that someone else might take you seriously, I have to disagree. As a web/graphics developer for a church, simple and clean is always the best way. Don't detract from your message with cheap inconsistent distracting fonts. IMHO
Grungey fonts. They ALWAYS use grungey type fonts for teen things.
Being a church secretary and therefore the one responsible for making the bulletin, I have struggled greatly with the temptation to go fontastic. I’m ashamed to admit the former secretary and I used to go a little wild with fonts and made our bulletin look like a kid’s Sunday school take home paper. I won’t even go into our shameful usage of clip art — that’s a whole other post. My past font transgressions have caused me to become extremely legalistic and decide that the only font suitable enough for the bulletin now is Calibri, although occasionally I’ll let loose and use italicized Times New Roman. I’m proud to say, our bulletin is much more clean and professional than it was back in the dark days of font addiction. I’ve been clean for years and I ain’t goin’ back to my old ways!