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For some technical reasons that escape me, the ‘Captains Logs’ from the first expedition to the international space station, the historic inception of what has become humanity’s continuous habitation of space….. is in Comic Sans

I'm 65 and my late father was an old school Sign Maker / Sign Painter. His pet peeve at the onset of computerized sign lettering was that "It has no soul. It looks machine-made." He continued to hand draw and hand paint his letters using his Speedball Lettering books until the day he retired. And his signs showed it, each was a unique Work of Art.

You talk about the cover of that book and the kerning... meanwhile the V-to-A in “MEDIEVAL” is horrendous. 😅

He's literally describing the Uncanny Valley of handwriting fonts. And he's right and it's real.

My science teacher described my hand writing as if a drunken spider crawled out of a ink pot and crawled across the page

As a graphic designer, I loved every second of this

As a font creator - there are lot of ways to add that customization you're looking for -- that's why there are extra character sets in fonts that help create that. But it is hard to look at your own and not see where it doesn't quite look like your writing when you have a lot of variation in letter combinations and kerning. I don't even recognize my own font as my handwriting any longer because it's so different. And Comic Sans still is used so much because while it may not be a pretty font, it's an easy to read font that is great for accessibility.

Comic Sans is often prefered by those that are dyslexic as it is easier for them to read the letters distinctly to then form the words. This was supported by my dyslexic grandsons' specialist tutor. So, maligned as it is, it turns out Comic Sans serves a useful purpose for a section of the population.

I was a font and calligraphy nerd before i learned anything about graphic design, and i remember feeling so much joy in graphic design class learning that kerning had a name and other people besides me noticed and cared about it

Funny how Adam took this book "Records of the medieval sword" as a reference to illustrate that a designer would never take a standard font for the title of the book. Instead they would take care of every letter to make sure that the kerning is exactly right. And then, when I look at the title of the book in Adams hands, I see a much too big kerning space between the V and the A in medieval, so that it look almost like two seperate words. 🙂

Hearing that you were in the remedial zone for handwriting makes me feel such peace. I was placed in the special education for handwriting only throughout elementary. I was simultaneously in the gifted program. They would march me out to work on it. I'm so glad to know that I'm not alone in this experience.

I just watched this now (yeah a bit late, I seem to have missed it when it published), and it seems that since the release of this video, Stuff Made Here published a video where he tries to make a robot imitate his handwriting, and he precisely runs into the issue of the artificial writing being too same-y since there's no variation between letters.

I just watched a video from Stuff Made Here where he developed a handwriting font that made every S different, every A different...responding to the letter that came right before it. You two should collab and come up with a perfect Savage font.

My favorite thing about LEGO HQ is something I learned on James May's Toy Stories. The "Legoland Vault" they have fireproof archive shelves with a complete set of every single set in it's original box they've produced since 1958 arranged by year. Apparently the people who maintain it can tell what year someone was born because that is where they stop when looking through the shelves. Would be hilarious to see Adam take a tour of it in his usual "golden retriever" like excitement and compare it to James Mays deadpan delivery.

An Adam Savage Font would absolutely be Savage 💪

As he’s talking about word spacing and such ( 3:28 ) did I notice that the word “medieval” looks funny because the v and a seem far apart.

My handwriting was awful. I'm old enough that we were taught cursive and I could just never make it work. The problem was that to be neat I had to slow right down and that really interfered with my thought process and composition. In first year high school I took typing, and that changed everything. Then personal computers came along and I was typing away at the speed of thought while others hunted and pecked. Comic Sans: I worked in Q.A. for two different employers. When ISO came along, and later TS for the Auto Industry, we had to create all the procedure documents. My boss resolutely told me under no circumstances could we use Comic Sans. He didn't have to tell us, we all knew. Later, when I joined a Q.A. team with another employer, I started coming across all these documents in Comic Sans. "Really?" I said to a co-worker. "I know," he said, "that was before I came along".

I wish I was as excited about my life as Adam is about font thoughts.

My favorite font is Orator, one of the optional font balls for the IBM Selectric typewriter. It's all upper case. The lower case letters are just smaller. It was designed to be easily read without glasses. For when a person is giving a speech and reading it from a paper or maybe a teleprompter.

I had to take a typography class in college as part of my program, and I was caught way off guard by how immensely interesting it could be.

The comic book lettering font I've used since translating manga scans in the early 2000s is called Wild Words. It's all caps and the lowercase set is slightly different so you can feign natural variance when reusing the same letter side by side.

YESSSS!!! I want videos of Adam at Lego headquarters right here on Tested

hoping for a visit to LEGO headquarters by you, was surprised you used that particular book cover because, as a graphic art graduate from 1988, i saw bad kerning in the author's last name. lol

Everyone: "I wish I had a font of my own handwriting!" Me: "You want Comic Sans? Because that's how you get Comic Sans."

I figured that Futura Extra Bold would catch your eye. That is the font that NASA chose for all its panel nomenclature in the Apollo spacecraft.

I was dipped in nerd font lore from a young age. My architect parents had several books on them. There's truly no bottom to that hole.

I live in the UK. My local science fiction store is in Glastonbury. The owner still writes all his labels by Hand!Even the small ones for the figurines!

Fonts are definitely one of those things that are easy to not think about at all... until you have to think about them really hard once or twice, and it becomes difficult not to going forward. Designing some album covers awhile back was what clicked it for me personally, where I went in thinking "eh, I'll just use whatever default font looks nice and call it a day", but by the end had downloaded 50 font packs and was tweaking the kerning and placement by single pixels to get it all to look the way I wanted. It is absolutely an art form, and the fact that it is so often easy to overlook speaks to how good some people are at it.

Comic Sans is not only good for dyslexics, but it turns out that it's ridiculously good for writing. I forget the article that was about writer's block and trying comic sans. And, I remembered as a kid I really loved that font, and it was also the most I've ever written. So, I tried it. I have written THOUSANDS of words since switching. I may never publish because I'm not sure I have it in me to go through all that, but even if it's some weird psychological thing, comic sans really does work for keeping the flow going when writing. It's ridiculously bizarre, but I'm here to say it works.

For a large company like Lego to say "we'd love to have you, but we can't pay for airfare" is a slap in the face. Seriously, it would cost them less than 20K to fly you and your wife to Denmark and back, pay for a hotel, etc. The PR from that alone would be worth that paltry sum.

When I read comic books, I look at the lettering and I bet most people, when looking for differences, can spot a handwritten work vs a font pretty easily!

My graphic design teacher always said “Font is a four letter word.” A ‘font’ is one typeface in one size and one style (ie. 14 point Helvetica bold condensed). The correct terminology is typeface. Helvetica is a typeface. Twelve point helvetica bold italic is a font.

Could not agree more. I've done many things in my past life, but I'm a woodworker. However I use traditional tools as well as a CNC, diode laser and a vinyl cutter in my projects now. Hoping to add a 3D printer soon. ALL of this benefits from my college education in Graphic Design, not only from my understanding of software like Photoshop and Illustrator etc but also from a sense of form, function, human interfacing and readability. And YES I'm a font nerd. Also, I'm 55 and no spring chicken, but I love making, designing, images and communication and most of all your content. Thank you for your passion and all you do Adam.

I’ve been a follower of Adam Savage’s work for decades nows and had no idea he had a graphic design background. 100% this advice here. Graphic design is an excellent lens to learn all of the other design diciplines. Have done type design and making a full typeface is very difficult. Especially a robust one that stands the test of time requires a master. Sidenote: I wouldn’t recommend using Futura in anything other than for a title, Bold and all caps with some good tracking.

Graphic designer here and I’m so happy to hear you speak font nerd ❤

1:06 this is so accurate. I did graphic design in high school and now i do animations that literally revolve around fonts

"Yeah I have FONT THOUGHTS, lets get to it!" got me 🤣🤣

I went to school for graphic design and never went into the field. It was years later when I started doing cosplay that many of the things I learned in school applied to the hobby. Also, I never gave typefaces a second glance, but had to take a typography class as part of my degree and immediately became a font nerd". This discussiong really resonated with me!

I didn't know that I needed a nerdy presentation about fonts but that was awesome.

I also love Caslon, and old school Baskerville, and Bodoni.

As a former journalism student, and an educator, there is only one font; Times New Roman. All others are different.

I made a font with my hand-writing back in the 90's. There was a software from Pixar, called Typestry for the Mac back then, which you could use to make Postscript fonts. It was a lot of fun to make the font, but I never used it for anything.

Font nerd here too... The Kerning between the V and the A of Medieval on that book cover is way off! :D

As a bit of trivia: a "font" is a computer program that tells another program how to draw a letter or other character on a screen. As such, it is copyrightable, because computer programs are copyrightable. A "typeface," on the other hand, is the actual shape of the letters on the screen or paper, and (in Canada and the US, anyway) is too fundamental to be copyrighted. (A few typefaces that were created for logos have been trademarked, but that's a different kettle of wax.) This is why there are a bazillion free fonts that recreate for-pay ones - the free font is a different program, and thus a different copyright.

Dude, the Secret Archive™at LEGO... I'm legit afraid you'll ne'er come back out 🤣they have every single LEGO set, back to the very first one, it's amazing...! 🤩And it's not part of the tour or the museum, it's a working space, this cramped storage room in the basement through a tiny door (at least it was when I was there a few years ago) - it feels so personal & intimate, all those sets right there, stacked on shelves... man, you'll love it! Also, let us know when you're going - Imma have to reach out to my friend there & get him to let me come hear you talk 😁

I've always loved the font library that comes with Autocad

"YES I HAVE FONT THOUGHTS" Hahhahaa Fonts/Typefaces are so fun and fascinating and so much detail goes into them.

I'm dyspraxic, and I struggled for years learning to write legibly. It was hugely discouraging. Then one day I got a new art teacher at school - Mr Harris. The way he wrote was just so distinctive that it fundamentally changed the way I understood the form of letters, and almost instantly made me better at writing. I didn't realize, until watching this little video, that what he did was draw letters in the same way as drawing anything else.

I had a similar problem with my handwriting in elementary school, but my dad "fixed" things for me in a different way. His background was in PCB design, but back before they did that stuff on computers (so drafting tables and those articulated fluorescent desk lamps with the magnifying glasses built in). He gave me one of those green transparent plastic guide bar things (I don't know what they're called) that drafters use to keep their lettering within a certain space, and had me do all of my classwork within that guide. Looked a bit awkward at first (particularly with letters that had to be drawn below the line) and I got a lot of stares from my classmates but I stuck with it and my handwriting improved massively, although it necessarily meant that cursive went out the window.

When I was in elementary school my handwriting was so bad, they wouldn't even let me learn cursive. Then when I transferred to a new school, I was given extra homework to practice cursive. One summer during middle school, I was so frustrated with my handwriting that I found several fonts I liked, Frankensteined them together and filled an entire composition notebook with this new handwriting. While it worked for the most part, I still struggle to keep it tidy at times. The most exciting thing I've discovered though is, like many aspects of the way humans exist, each person's handwriting is unique in every single moment and I often use my handwriting to check in with myself in how I'm feeling. If I'm in the zone and feeling centered, its stable and legible. If I'm feeling off, it's messy and inconsistent.

i love the way your mind works and i couldnt agree more with this outlook. locking my handwriting into an actual thing would bore me cause my writing is so representative of my emotions in the moment of writing. ive never thought of this concept of turning my handwriting into a thing unitll now.

As a graphic designer hearing Adam talk so passionately about fonts and their mofology almost make me cry of happyness. This man is a legend.

Surprisingly, they still teach cursive in my area (British Columbia, Canada).

I used to work for a print company. Working with the font houses fascinated me. I was always shocked at the exorbitant cost of some fonts.

I started with Letraset at 7 or 8 I think. Always liked opening credits on new movie releases for the photography boundary pushing effects. The fonts created are nice to see, but the title with or without artwork is the main fontavigranza.

My mother taught me calligraphy from a very early age, I'm now 52 and still get comments about my handwriting lol and strangely I am also fairly good at art, now because I've always past these things onto my daughter she is at college with the view of becoming an special effects artist sfx specialist. And I've been getting her to watch you videos since the start of mythbusters Adam

Letter types are typefaces; fonts are the variations of the typefaces (bold, italic, serif,). From a typeface nerd. 😊

In an effort to improve my handwriting, I've been practicing my writing, both cursive and script, for a couple of years now. You are right about the beauty of letterforms. I've been concentrating on mine and find myself fascinated by the subtle inconsistencies in the shapes of the same letters. I considered sourcing a personal handwriting font but decided against it because I decided it would be too consistent and would not look like real handwriting. Oh, I use a fountain pen. Medium and broad cursive italic nibs are my favorites. richard -- "The only thing worse than a serif typeface ... is a sans serif typeface." - Marcel Duchamp

As a fellow typography nerd (ex-graphic-artist-turned-designer: retired hurt) I was bouncing up and down at the font question. Having variant letterforms is the recipe for a great dynamic font which could be more readable by dyslexic and visual stress (often ND) sufferers. But I agree, it’s a rabbit hole leading to a labyrinth with little caves full of dragons and treasures and most of my projects have foundered.

For a font of your handwriting you want to use contextual alternates - this allows you to have multiple versions of each letter and in software it can be set with the letters chosen at random. Nothing irks me more than a heading or even a logo set in a ‘hand drawn’ style font that has repeated letters that don’t use alternates.

I always use Comic Sans for reading books. Its just the best font for it.

The font company P22 has done some great artist handwriting fonts, with doodles. I used to use Jo Hopper’s hand writing font for my holiday letters - it’s legible and has the warmth of the hand. But fonts are a lot more expensive these days, so I can’t afford it any longer.

I fell in love with the typeface "Syntax" many years ago, when it was used in the CI of my university. I am no typographer, but so far I have not seen another font where the ends of the terminals are not parallel to the baseline.

"inimitable" that was the biggest flex in this video.

I still watch your reruns on discovery everyday, Adam. 🙂

Many fonts have differences in how letters look next to other letters included within them. It takes more work, but those subtle kerning details and even letter shapes can be altered for all kinds of combinations.

"A good designer would blow that way up and make sure the kerning works across all those letters" MEDIEV AL SWORD 😅

As Adam was reading that first question I was thinking "I want a Laura Kampf font!" right before he read that part 😂

Comic book fonts have used autoligatures to make fonts appear to more hand-written. Nate Piekos of Blambot has made several people's handwriting into fonts.

I love Verdana! It's nearly as readable as Comic Sans, but still works for business applications.

I could not help but notice all the Papyrus font in your Middle Earth maps. No judgement. Tee hee. That said/implied, I was curious about your Comic Sans subject line here, too. I will read Mike Lacher's piece. I tried one of those make-your-own-font-from-your-handwriting sites and was remarkably unimpressed by my handwriting as a font. Ugh. I'd rather write it in longhand myself. Font nerdiness is a great place to reside.

My husband says my handwriting is the visual equivalent of those Navajo Code Speakers from WWII…nobody can decipher it!

Adam being a futura fan makes honestly too much sense

Certainly in the UK, Comic Sans is only commonly installed font that renders the lowercase 'a' in the way children are taught to write it.

I know Adam's running a business and all, but I can't help but think that 'LEGO invited me to Denmark' would be a more than reasonable excuse to delay a project.

Awesome shoutout to Ewart Oakeshott! As a sword nerd that made me happy :D

Futura and Caslon are my favorite fonts as well!

My favorite Font has always been Old English, I have several tattoos with Old English or Calligraphy Font.

I have dysgraphia and I loooove fonts. I have tried a lot in my life to have legible writing. I have finally got it legible, but I have never been able to do stylized lettering.

Thanks

I enjoy using my font (yes I made a font with my handwriting) only in special circumstances where I want the message to be more personal. So, in rare occasions, I'll use my font for the document signature, or quote blocks.

Comic Sans! Reminds me of when I was an app developer I always used comic sans for text that only displayed in debug mode. This made it super jarring and very obvious that it shouldn't really be there should a mistake be made and it appear in a RC build.

That explaination of how handwriting works is mindblowing! Because most people don't think about it - they just write how they learned it... 😉 And is "doctor's prescription" a candidate for the most unreadable handwriting in history? 😂😁😇🤟

Love that used Oakshottes book just cause it was close at hand.

'almost futura' ... what an understatement

I learned to write cursive (called "script" at the time) at St. Barnabas Elementary School in the Bronx/Yonkers (it was located on the border between them). But I stopped writing cursive altogether in 10 grade. Well, aside from my signature at least. If you are ever outside the Bronx High School of Science during dismissal and want to identify the sophomores, it isn't difficult. The sophomores are the students with t-squares sticking out of their backpacks. Every 10 grader is (or at least was 40 years ago) required to take a year of mechanical drawing (i.e., drafting). As part of that class, we had to learn to "letter." According to Mr. Kohler my teacher, machines print, people letter. As my handwriting had never been all that good, I decided that I would be better off printing err lettering so that I could both read my own writing better and be better understood by others trying to read what I had written. It's just human nature that the less a grader has to struggle to read your essay, the higher grade you are likely to get. In 11th grade, we got a semester of Science Techniques Laboratory (STL). STL was basically a shop class where you needed to write a paper about the science involved in whatever your term project had been. I built an infinity box that my father gave away while I was off at college. But I never took a class in graphical design. Believe it or not, even having attended a school called The Bronx High School of Science, I never had a class involving a computer. They started offering a computing class to 9th graders during my senior year. I guess I was born too early.

Hi Adam and crew! I'm currently working on an interesting take on a stein. It was progressing well until I got overzealous and decided I wanted to open the lid with a gear system (all hand candcarved) and I'm having trouble settling on a design that will work with my vision of the finished project. It's close to old mechanical puppetry but not nearly as advanced. I'm also pretty stuck on which direction to go go on weathering. The stein is inspired by old large sail ships (3-5 mast) and the handcarved handle is a mermaid designed after said ships figureheads. The gearing mechanism is her face and hair. Would any of you folks be up for helping me on this? I'd really appreciate it and thank you folks for putting out your content. Been a long time fan of Adam and a sub of the channel. Cheers, TNG

I discovered a windows program called 'fontographer' in the context of manipulating typefaces for broadcast character generators sometime in the late 90s; this was for Mtv Europe, & iirc we needed to tweak a couple of existing shapes for an effect. intrigued by the mechanics of glyph resizing, I wrote out an ascii set in my own handwriting & generated a typeface from it, in ttf format. this too found its way into the broadcast machines as well as a bunch of computers at work, & I saw it on air a few times, as well as on signs dotted around our building. (some years earlier, I had equipped an abekas A72 broadcast CG with a font that a show's designer wanted to use, but was unavailable for the machine; I achieved this by scanning the individual characters from a page torn out of a letraset catalogue, shoved under a caption camera & into a quantel paintbox, cleaning them up & importing them one at a time into the abekas. when this made the machine crash, the uk representatives came to see me: "no-one's done this on a european machine before, so far as we know". I learned a lot about relative character sizes, kerning, drops, risers... & it aired on a BBC2 show every week for months!) I figured it might be nice to make one for my mother, who was having trouble writing longhand, from samples of her handwriting. later on, after cottage-industry CD manufacture grew too tiresome for my band's increasing popularity, I sent the ttf of my handwriting to the plant where we got our CDs made, so that they would resemble the earlier hand-made editions. one thing I noted was that even if an individual character was somewhat wayward, when you saw it a few times in context, it didn't matter- the inconsistencies were gone, & the eye could follow almost anything vaguely recognisable if it formed part of a recognisable word. I'm wondering if the idea can be revived now that no-one writes longhand any more.

When CERN released their discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle, their Power Point presentation to the world was in Comic Sans.

I love typography so much!!

@5:02 “Hey wanna see my Dr. Evil?!”

I've made a couple fonts for documentary films by sampling old newspaper tyoe (including the ink bleed into the paper) and 60's typewriter fonts and such, and what I really want for those but especially handwriting-based fonts, is to be able to sample 10 different versions of the same letter with micro & mini variations and have the font randomly pick one version to display when you hit a character. Seeing exactly the same "r" repeated in a short space really kills the illusion

I couldn't read my own handwriting so I taught myself calligraphy. I am VERY picky about fonts having learned how letters are formed.

For a school video project, I put in a Mythbusters blue print style text card, and to best emulate the handwriting, I chose Comic Sans. Cool to hear it come up in Adam's q&a

Futura is my all time favourite font. I'm a graphic designer by trade and there is just something magical about Paul Renner's design. Sadly it was also the favourite of a certain German dictator.

Comic Sans helps young struggling readers. For some students with reading challenges the typical “a” in most fonts throws them off since it’s so much different than how you typically hand write an “a”. Comics Sans is one of the few default fonts which has a lower case “a” which is written like a handwritten lower case “a”. I am aware that fonts like OpenDyslexic and Atkinson Hyperlegible are designed specifically to help make text accessible, the issue is those fonts are not installed on every machine. Though Comic Sans may not be the absolute optimal font for accessibility, it’s ubiquitousness in so many pieces of software makes it easier to quickly utilize than other accessibility fonts which need to be installed before use. Comic Sans might be long maligned, but it has its place in the fonts tool chest!

Cool. I am a Graphic Designer. Been working in print design since the 1980’s and originally did everything thing on drawing boards and darkroom work before training on a Compugraphic typesetter. These days since the advent of PC’s design has become lazy. I studied Ogilvy on Type as a guidance to layout type correctly. Now, of course, I’m a Mac addict and started ground up in DTP using Quark XPress before Adobe swept the board with InDesign and Illustrator - now I use the the latest Adobe CS. Though there are cheaper alternatives. My favourite fonts are dependant on the application.

I love that t-shirt design too...

Have you seen Stuff Made Here’s recent stuff about handwritten typefaces?