The Breakup...



Ban it!



I guess it started here on the blog a little while ago... I guess I should have seen it coming, but it still doesn't really make it easier...

You see, for many many years, probably from almost my beginning days as a Salaryman here in Japan I have had a very good working relationship with the font Arial. In the beginning it was not that serious, I used is most of the time, but sometimes I forgot and just used the default times roman. But as time passed, our relationship deepened and I started using Arial for basically everything written, both in work and in private. If you sent me a file in Times New Roman, chances are that I did a quick "select all" and quickly changed it all to Arial before I bothered reading through it.

The change happened here on the blog on June the 8th... Suddenly I felt like it would be nice to use another font and changed to trebuchet here on the blog. I guess I should have seen it coming already then, that me and Arial had started drifting apart, our working relationship was still OK, not very dynamic or exciting, I no longer felt any enthusiasm for changing the font in other people's documents to Arial but did it mostly out of habit.

Then, just a few months ago, I started using Calibri a little, just a bit on the side. I had seen the font in use in other documents and found it appealing and started little by little using it more myself. Me and Arial still tried to keep things as normal as possible, but it was clear that the flame had gone out, our relationship was no longer exciting or dynamic, it was just running on fumes and good 'ol times.


Last week I did the breakup. It wasn't easy, but I think it was best for both of us. I changed my default font and font in e-mail signature to Calibri and sticking with that font now for all documents. It feels fresh and exciting, every time I do a "select all" on a document now I feel a rush as I see the document turn into a nice looking Calibri fonted document.

It feels sad to have said good bye to Arial after all the years we spent together and all the documents that it helped me create or make better looking, but it was time to move on. I'm a very monogamous font kinda guy, I have a font and then I stick with it for letters, power point, excel and any other software that uses a font. I hope that me and Calibri can stick it out for many years but we are still getting to know each other. I have toyed with the thought of changing some old documents I'm still using from Arial to Calibri, but have so far resisted since it would feel wrong to ruin all the memories of our good times together. 

But hey, maybe I just once in a while could play around a bit with Courier for some stuff, after all, I have Trebuchet mainly here for my blog and there's no reason why Calibri would ever find out...