Papyrus.

It’s right up there with Comic Sans as one of the worst typefaces available.

In fact, it’s probably used even more than Comic Sans, so that takes it up a notch, right above CS. Well done, Papyrus. You suck it hard.

The trouble is, Papyrus is widely available, as well as being terrible.

You can use it in Microsoft Word.

Or Works.

Or Photoshop.

Or Paint.

It’s there for all the neophyte (and pre-neophyte) wannabe graphic designers to use, and because it “looks different” than all the other “fonts” (because they are unable to recognize the subtleties in some of the incredibly elegant typefaces they are provided alongside the horrible display ones), they use it on everything.

Papyrus on the side of a spaceship on the cover of a DVD box for a Science Fiction movie. That was probably the most insulting example. Though almost everywhere you see it is bad. Even for places like yoga studios, where it could probably work just fine as a header typeface if not for its popularity, use it for body type, which renders all of their collateral illegible and terribly ugly.

It hurts. It really hurts.

So I ask, politely, that a call go out to do-it-yourselfer non-designers to please, stop using Papyrus. Because with time, like nuclear energy, if we go long enough without a major mishap, perhaps we could start to use it on a small scale again without tiptoeing along the razor’s edge of (aesthetic) self-destruction.