The new Stanford font is awful

Oh, wow, she’s absolutely clueless about typography and gets some pretty basic facts wrong. (To pick just one example, Crimson is not the new typeface. Large organizations that have a rather decentralized structure – like universities – tend to favor fonts that are easily available to everyone for their day-to-day communication. Stanford just picked a popular font with a SIL Open Font License, but they do not use that font for the wordmark. Crimson was not specifically created for Stanford, though it was, funnily enough, created by a German guy.)

All of this is very embarrassing and finds its ridiculous apex when the author scolds the wordmark for having a taller f than S. I would suggest taking a good look at Sabon or maybe the headline of her article (the blog uses Georgia which is a mighty fine font, not too dissimilar from what Stanford now uses for their wordmark).

I don’t think there is anything wrong with disliking the new wordmark, but if you lash out at it you should at least try to get your facts straight.

(I personally do like the wordmark, though. It’s a conservative, carful change, but that seems entirely appropriate for a university. I’m not such a huge fan of all of the applications. Sabon – in combination with all-caps – looks fine but also quite old-fashioned and cliche – and Stanford never struck me as that.)