10 Fonts to leave in the 2010’s

Entering a new decade is as good a time as ever to do a design ‘house-cleaning’ and discard the design choices that should be left in the 2010s. Many of these fonts are still beautiful fonts, and that in itself is the issue. When a font becomes popular, everyone wants to use it which can bring the beautiful type face to a sad, early demise.  

There are quite a few fonts we’ve just seen too much of in the 2010’s. If you want to modernize your content for the new decade, consider staying away from these fonts that have overstayed their welcome on our digital content.  

LiebeErika Font: 

The LeibeErika font was created right on the cusp of the decade at the end of 2009. Loved by organic food markets and Livingroom jewelry pop up promotions, this once natural and feminine font has finally started to fade from the trendy scene.  

It saturated the font market, which replaced the playful and natural essence for that of a 5th grade teacher’s pet penmanship essence. As with the death of many fonts, we loved this font too, hard, too fast and caused it’s inevitable early demise. 

Affair Font 

Picture the last Valentine’s day themed party invite you received – it was probably using affair font. The affair font conveys the air of romance, expensive taste, and old luxury.  

The affair font was inspired by a 9×9 photocopy of a page from an old 1950s lettering book found in a New York library. Because the creator was on his honeymoon when he fell in love with and started mapping out the font, he coined the font “Affair.” 

While this style of writing used to be all the rage for fancy restaurant menus and wedding invitations, new luxury has brought to light the elegance of a clear, no-frills font that complements design instead of stealing the whole show. 

In the age of simplicity, this curvy swoopy loopy extras leave us feeling overwhelmed – it’s time to tone down the font roller coaster and let this typeface go into hibernation for a while.  

The Lobster Font 

We feel so strongly about the demise of this font we wrote an entire blog about it.  

The font was created in 2010 and introduced to the Google font library. It started popping up on websites, on packaging, in logos and ads. No one could resist it— just ask the 14.9 million people who have downloaded the font. 

Lobster has lost its vitality. It has become so popular, people have started to call it “the new Comic Sans,” which is the opposite of a compliment in the design world. 

While it is pretty, let’s put this one to rest so we can enjoy it later. 

Impact 

A bold, strong, no-nonsense font that grabs attention and gets the job done. This fond can be found used on brochure headers, Emails and products geared towards men. However, it is not the world’s most versatile typeface.  

The once (and still) popular choice for headers found its way into novice email and website headers, giving Impactan amateurish reputation. And, people eventually realized that while the font is striking, the narrow size of the letters are not conducive to speed-reading or skimming.  

The best designers now know to skip over this font and use an option that is wider and not overused for a legible look that still stands out.  

The Middle Break

The middle break font was a popular font design choice for those who love to write phrases like ‘live laugh love’ or doodles their crush’s name during 9th grade lit class. We collectively freaked out over the creative style of the middle break, but then quickly understood that it took approximately 7x longer to read a single word. While cute, this font sacrifices legibility for cuteness with a skinny and bubbly lettering that leaves the reader initially confused on how to go about reading the phrase.

Was the illegibility of the font worth the whimsical design? We don’t think so.

Franklin Gothic 

Franklin Gothic has been a popular choice in the past for designers that wanted to convey a timeless, newspaper-style digital design. However, thanks to the widespread usage of Franklin Gothic when websites were a new and exciting option, this typeface will now always be connected to websites created circa 2006.  

While Franklin gothic is a well-respected font with a lot of history attached to the Franklin font family, giving this typeface a small rest may give it the opportunity it needs to re-build its reputation and gain a more modern stance in future designs. 

Gil Sans Light Shadowed 

While creative and dynamic, Gil Sans Light Shadowed is a great example of making the creativity of a font much more important than the readability of a font. While you may be able to skirt by with one large ‘power word’ in Gil Sans Light Shadowed, is it really worth giving your readers a concentration headache? 

For most of us legibility beats creativity, so it may be time to retire the shadowed fonts and give our readers a chance to step out of the shadows and into the clear, simple-to-read light.  

Papyrus 

Papyrus – how could we not include it? Though it has been considered an inappropriate font option in all instances minus Egyptian-themed designs for years now, it is still one of the most hated fonts on the market.  

In it’s hey-day it could be found in adventure movie branding and even some more professional financial companies for a moment. For the most part, people quickly caught on that if you want to be taken seriously, you don’t include Papyrus in your digital or print messages.  

So, just in case there is still anyone out there considering using Papyrus for their professional, non-ironic digital messaging, here is a kind request to please refrain.  

Bradley Hand 

Hand-written fonts made their debut as people wanted their invitations and designs to look handmade and from the heart. Plot twist – a hand-written font style doesn’t indicate more care went into the design. On the contrary, it can look tacky and outdated.  

The font that was intended to humanize digital text and add a personal touch actually makes a message seem inauthentic and less genuine. That’s the last reaction we want to have attached to our digital messages – so next time, skip the hand-written and cut to a clear and honest font.  

TheSans Basic 

It’s in the name – it’s basic. How could a typeface with ‘basic’ in its name make it on our list of fonts to take a break from this decade? We’ll give you a clue – or shall we say Que. 25 of the 26 letters in this typeface are perfectly nice-looking, save for the capital Q. A design risk gone awry, this one capital letter turns this versatile, generic font into a font with a weird querk.  

So close to being a great day-to-day option, we still feel the need to choose something more generic for every letter in the alphabet.