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Pencils Down

How well do you think you could look at a newspaper full of a variety of fonts and be able to identify each font by name? That is what I did today. Something happened to the font manager on my system and, basically, it stopped managing. That's right, my system has achieved font anarchy. None of my fonts were showing. Quark wasn't smart enough to tell me the name of the missing fonts so I had to test my font recognition skills while sorting through the thousand fonts in our files. Surprisingly I was able to recognize most of them without too much effort. Still, with a 28 page newspaper filled with ads... I was fixing my font problem most of the morning.

Here's a quick pop-quiz. Name the following fonts:

comment already

because there’s nothing that amuses me more than hearing your pathetic opinion

1. i should know this one...
2. Impact
3. Arial Black
4. Letterman? the W is different...
5. Hobo

question is - why would ANYONE use all of these fonts in one newspaper?

Bubble font, tall font, don't know, don't know, nice font.

How'd I do?

Ooh, Lynne, so close.

Valette was right on 2, 3, & 5.

The fonts in question are:
1. Eras
2. Impact
3. Arial Black
4. Machine
5. Hobo

These fonts and dozens more were daring to be named. The only one on this list that gave me troubles was #1. I kept thinking it looked like Boulder, but the slight slant finally gave it away. The font that took me the longest to uncover was Chow Mein cause I have to admit that I never use that font (it was in an ad made by a previous production person).

do i get a prize?

A blue ribbon, and the satisfaction in knowing we'll all be bothering you when we have a font we can't name :)