Re: Complaining about Courier

["Bonni J. Graham" <bgraham -at- ELECTRICITI -dot- COM>]

Courier is a *fine* monospace font -- but so is Lucida Fax, with the added
advantage that it has some interesting lettershapes to it and it doesn't
look like what everybody else is using and you can get it for about fifty
bucks in a Truetype font pack.  However, to me, reading through resumes
that are responding to an ad that specifically asks for desktop design
experience, it shrieks "TYPEWRITER!  I think of the PC as a TYPEWRITER!!!!"
 Which was not what we were looking for.

However, the Courier defenders DO have a point -- I should have made it
clearer that it was my personal preference that was a deciding factor.  And
that I didn't toss the resumes sight unseen.  I read everything, and more
often than not, the most egregious errors also happened to be on the
resumes using Courier.  At the time, I couldn't see that as a coincidence,
although it might have been.

Someone else mentioned that magazine editors seem to look for Courier or
some other monospaced font (I'm parapharsing).  Doesn't surprise me much --
there's many years of tradition behind that.  But if I'm looking for new,
fresh design (which I was), I'll look past Courier, Times Roman, and
Arial/Helvetica. Not that they don't have their place, mind you -- I've
used them before and I'll use them again.

Of course, I don't even use a traditional resume unless I absolutely have
to -- mine's in a brochure format with a slip-in curriculum vitae, so see
how I am.

Typesettingly yours,
Bonni Graham
Manual Labour
Director, Region 8 Conference
bgraham -at- electriciti -dot- com