Font Police is patrolling the world for bad typography. We issue misdemeanours for spelling mistakes and lengthy sentences in our criticisms.

This is a light-hearted humour site, with no offence intended. Send ideas to submissions@ followed by fontpolice.org.

Posts tagged with New Zealand

Quit school The New Zealand Government embarks on a campaign to lighten the load on the education budget. (Via oneandiwatson on Instagram.)

Quit school The New Zealand Government embarks on a campaign to lighten the load on the education budget. (Via oneandiwatson on Instagram.)

Grave retouching From a display at Te Papa Tongarewa National Museum of New Zealand. This should have been done better, since it is for the gravestone of a fallen soldier, from a real-life photograph (where the other gravestones have their original engravings). Problem: Helvetica was not around in the 1910s.

Grave retouching From a display at Te Papa Tongarewa National Museum of New Zealand. This should have been done better, since it is for the gravestone of a fallen soldier, from a real-life photograph (where the other gravestones have their original engravings). Problem: Helvetica was not around in the 1910s.


Posted at 7.16 am

Thank goodness it’s temporary No matter how hard you try, someone is going to use the stencil upside-down and backwards.

Thank goodness it’s temporary No matter how hard you try, someone is going to use the stencil upside-down and backwards.

The worst offender so far at Font Police Found by Conrad Johnston in Whitby. Where do we begin? The W and y in Whitby in the first photo are at weird angles. The dots are missing from the is. Whitby is in Baskerville and Sections is in Times New Roman. To match the cap and x-height proportion of the first word, the S in Sections has had to be enlarged. We haven’t even looked at the capitalization of the words in the text in the window, but we will note that that text has been expanded artificially, while Whitby Sections has been condensed.

On to the second photo: the second s in sales is upside-down. It’s more apparent here that the o in Sections is not upright. The centring of the text in the window sucks. Smart quotes are not used, and why are quotes there anyway? Why is Experts capitalized—or is it meant to be ironic, since whomever put the signage up was not an expert?

Some serious Font Police charges are going to be laid against this typographic disaster.

Shoppiug Ceutre Lambton Square got the ns and us right with part of the name, so we know the person doing the signage had access to both letters. Why, then, did they employ an upside-down u for the two ns in Shopping Centre?

Shoppiug Ceutre Lambton Square got the ns and us right with part of the name, so we know the person doing the signage had access to both letters. Why, then, did they employ an upside-down u for the two ns in Shopping Centre?

The big one One should never mix Arial with Helvetica. They are two different typeface families. Spotted at Auckland International Airport.

The big one One should never mix Arial with Helvetica. They are two different typeface families. Spotted at Auckland International Airport.

Hyphens, hyphens everywhere This is a bad use of the hyphen, in place of both a dot (or colon) and an en dash in the times. Were those keys missing from the signmaker’s keyboard?

Hyphens, hyphens everywhere This is a bad use of the hyphen, in place of both a dot (or colon) and an en dash in the times. Were those keys missing from the signmaker’s keyboard?

Mixed type This is actually quite a nice job with a clever idea, though mixing Letraset Corinthian with Gill Sans on the same line is less clever.

Mixed type This is actually quite a nice job with a clever idea, though mixing Letraset Corinthian with Gill Sans on the same line is less clever.

weirdinwellington: Panhandling made easy. (Courtesy Robyn Gallagher) Making it look worse than it has to be In a post-Letraset world, it should not be that hard to get the right characters, unless the sign is intentionally taking the piss and making the user look poorer than (s)he really is.

weirdinwellington:

Panhandling made easy. (Courtesy Robyn Gallagher)

Making it look worse than it has to be In a post-Letraset world, it should not be that hard to get the right characters, unless the sign is intentionally taking the piss and making the user look poorer than (s)he really is.

(via weirdinwellington)

Can’t count on it That’s the problem with these dot-matrix displays. This one shows the numerals in Klingon. Or some alien script system.

Can’t count on it That’s the problem with these dot-matrix displays. This one shows the numerals in Klingon. Or some alien script system.