R.I.P. Madrone, 1991–2011

April 19, 2011 • 10:23 am • POSTED BY timothy o'donnell

Currently, there’s an A to Z blogging challenge underway  — post about a letter of the alphabet every day in April except Sundays; beginning with ‘A’ on the April Fool’s Day and ending with ‘Z’ on the 30th. You don’t need to be Nostradamus to foresee an avalanche of x-ray and xylophone-related posts on April 28.

I’m not even going to try to meet that challenge, but it did remind me about something I was working on last year. Intended as a type specimen book as written by Charles Addams or Edward Gorey, Character Assassination (or, Accidents Grotesque) chronicles the grisly deaths of various typefaces, led to their doom by weaknesses in their characters — just like people.

We do attribute personality traits to fonts, subconsciously; an art director may select Univers because it is rational and unemotional — if you break up with Univers, it’s not going to call you at 3am in a torrent of drunken tears. Similarly, a kindergarten teacher putting together a class handout will choose Comic Sans because it’s fun and friendly — if you’re waiting for Univers to bring in cupcakes for your birthday, you’ve got a long, frosting-less wait ahead. Once you start assigning human characteristics to typefaces, it’s a short hop to developing emotionally biased relationships with them. There are fonts that we love  — Helvetica even has its own movie — and fonts we’d love to see come to a horrible end (see the aforementioned Comic Sans.)

Today’s* letter in the A-Z blog challenge is “M” — here’s a cautionary tale just in time for grilling season, but sadly too late to save hapless Madrone.

Wise gourmets will heed the warning
left behind by dead Madrone –
‘Cook poultry thoroughly’, the words
they etched upon his stone

* well, last Friday, when this was written