Schenectady Synecdoche

There's a reason Georgia doesn't look clean enough: it was designed as a screen font. It's not meant for print. Which is why it looks good to the lifeclever author on PDFs, but not elsewhere.

I, too, like Gill Sans, but when I was sending out my materials last year, I opted for Times New Roman because of what I imagined as the austerity factor: search committees, I thought, want bare-bones plain-ness. So I just did my best to use white space well, and steered clear of what I thought might be seen as font-choice preciousness.

I'm changing that approach the next time I send stuff out. It's gonna be either Gill Sans or some classic serif like Caslon or (dare I say it?) Bodoni Narrow. (I'd argue that Garamond, for all its elegance and in all its variations, had become trite precisely because it's so gorgeous and overused.)

It's hilarious that you say that. I walked into a meeting this afternoon, for which members had been provided a document by Person A, who hadn't yet arrived at the meeting. With visions of typefaces still dancing in my head, I looked at the document and said, "What font is this?" And Person B (who, it turns out, had already read this blog entry), told me it was Garamond 11. "Hmm, Garamond," sez I. "Pretty nice." And then we debated whether Garamond is a "true" type.
Me: How do you know whether a type is true?
B: I work on a PC, and it has a little icon that tells me. I don't know how a Mac user would know.
Well, that, of course, sets me on yet another crusade: to find out (a) what the true types are, and (b) to find out how Mac users can tell.
And your comment, of course, inspires my typesnobbery (which is, incidentally, entirely derivative. I'm claiming that I have taste, but in fact most of my alleged "taste" comes from slavishly adhering to whatever pronouncements are being made by the designers I'm reading. And by the People Whose Judgment I Respect and Who Comment on My Blog. Garamond? Wouldn't touch the stuff!