It's no secret among my students that I'm not a fan of Gill Sans.
I speak openly about the topic to my students, but this semester, I had the time to codify it. My ire for Gill Sans is three-fold:
1: It's cumbersome // I've had to use Gill Sans professionally many times in my career — once a combo of Gill Sans and Perpetua as a corporate typeface combo. The awkward fillets and the barbs on the spurs of the letters remind more more of a Pontiac Aztek than a Ferrari Dino — it just tries too hard... there's no grace. Its stance is also wide which makes it very hard to use eloquently as body copy, I've found. It's one of those "why eat at McDonald's?" things... there's always a better choice. Always. You want a humanist? There are hundreds. You want a geometric sans-serif? There are plenty of others. IMHO, Gill Sans looks great in all-caps on top of train station entrances in London and that's about it... and even then, Avenir would be a better choice.
2: It's common // For a while now, Gill Sans has been included as a typeface font in the Microsoft Office suite of products. This means that 84.3% of the really terrible PowerPoint presentations you see are in Gill Sans... and your mechanical engineer brother-in-law thinks it's cool. Nothing Steve thinks is cool is actually cool. Gill Sans has jumped the shark. Its defense? It's better than Comic Sans... and that's a weak defense.
3: It's creepy // Eric Gill was a creepy dude. How do you feel about Bill Cosby? Can you watch Himself and still laugh... or worse old Jello commercials? How do you feel about Woody Allen? Can you watch Hannah and Her Sisters and enjoy it? How about movies with Harvey Weinstein's fingerprints on them? While Eric Gill is not here to defend himself like the aforementioned folks, his purported actions are far worse than any of the above. Do your own research... decide if you can separate the art from the artist.
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