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 Wellington

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.

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?

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.

Overkerned Someone needs to check how the kerning pairs are being interpreted on this screen, with this very snug Tu. At the Duxton Hotel, Wellington, New Zealand.

Overkerned Someone needs to check how the kerning pairs are being interpreted on this screen, with this very snug Tu. At the Duxton Hotel, Wellington, New Zealand.

Can someone call a psychic to tell us what this says? Sent in by Warren at Idea Sauce, from the Wellington broadsheet The Dominion Post. There was a complementary billboard at the Basin Reserve in the same city—which was even less legible considering people speed past it at 50 km/h.

Can someone call a psychic to tell us what this says? Sent in by Warren at Idea Sauce, from the Wellington broadsheet The Dominion Post. There was a complementary billboard at the Basin Reserve in the same city—which was even less legible considering people speed past it at 50 km/h.

The proctologists are based here Lighting goes bad at Pearse House, Wellington, New Zealand. (Photographed by Tanya Sooksombatisatian.)

The proctologists are based here Lighting goes bad at Pearse House, Wellington, New Zealand. (Photographed by Tanya Sooksombatisatian.)