One Font to Rule Them All (Well … almost)

In my past life I used to be an artist. According to my Mother (God rest her soul), I started drawing when I learned how to hold a pencil! I wanted to be a comic book artist and even took that track in university. In the drawing class, Friday’s used to be “free day,” meaning we could draw whatever we wanted. We would present our drawings to the class and our classmates would critique our work. I always drew comic book characters. I remember one day in particular when I put up my piece, some of my classmates moaned. Then they went on to talk about how “stupid” and “childish” it was to draw comic books. My instructor, however, came to my defense. “If he continues with this,” he responded, “he’ll make more money in a year than most of you will see in your lifetime. Now, critique his work, not offer your opinions about the subject matter. If you’ve got nothing to say, keep your comments to yourself.” Needless to say, I felt pretty good about myself. No one had a snarky thing to say about my work from that point on. Not in class, anyway.

However, that dream never came to fruition. Maybe I just didn’t have the patience or the grit to keep at it, but I never became a comic book artist. In fact, I haven’t really done much artwork for ages now.[1]

But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on creativity. No. I turned to writing. I’ve written some fictitious short stories for people explaining theology. Plus I’ve contributed to two different published works with more on the way.[2] And I’m (still) working on my own book. Lastly, obviously, there’s this blog.

All of that to say, when it comes to writing, I look at the page — whether printer or digital — with an artist’s eye. And the presentation is really important to me; especifically the fonts. I remember I sent a copy of part of my book to a friend who happens to be an editor and he said, “Quit formatting the look of the page! Just finish the book already!”

But I can’t do that. Even in writing this blog the presentation has to look pleasant. And if it can’t look pleasant then it should look presentable, in the very least!

So a number of years ago I started a quest for a good — no, make that great — serif font. For those of us who may not know what that means, “serif” fonts have the little extras at the end of the letter (think Times New Roman). And “sans serif” fonts are the ones without that extra bit (think Arial). A non-negotiable point was the font had to have Open Source License. That means, the font had to be free to access, use, and distribute.

Through my research I located the Gentium font. It checked all the right boxes. When creating the font, Victor Gaultney looked to calligraphy for inspiration.[3] What he created is a beautiful font that flows more dynamically like a fountain pen than the static, uniformed letters of current popular fonts. Plus, it has a full character set for Greek and is one of the fonts recommended by Bill Mounce who teaches biblical Greek. If you ever see anything I control (like the liturgical pamphlets I create for services), the main font used will be Gentium.[4]

While Gentium is my favorite font, it’s not one of the font choices for the themes of my blog, so I have to select a different font. Below are the serif fonts available.[5]

Cambria: