Font Trends

Adrienne Raphel talks about a "font subculture" that took root at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop:

One poet arranged her tiny capital letters in text boxes, adjusting the serifs for every stanza. Another persisted in stoic, twelve-point Times New Roman; as she put it, “Anything else seemed like putting a dress on top of a dress.” Font trends went viral. One semester, we gradually started using smaller and smaller typefaces: eleven-point, then ten, then nine, disappearing into the page.

Typographer and poet Robert Bringhurst, however, has the last word:

Bringhurst draws a bright line between graphic design and writing a poem. “The relation between a poem and its font is often neurotic fixation,” he wrote to me in an elegant fifteen-point Constantia. “Only a writer with nothing to say should find himself distracted by the letters in which he says it.”