The most memorable (in a good way, not memorable in a WTF way, like “Henrietta & The Fugitive”) sketch from SNL‘s season 43 premiere was about an ugly font prominently featured in an eight-year-old movie about blue cat people. Topicality is overrated, anyway. In “Papyrus,” Ryan Gosling plays a man who’s haunted by the use of Papyrus in James Cameron’s Avatar, which somehow became the highest-grossing movie of all-time. The sketch is not kind to the font, but its creator isn’t upset. In fact, he found it hilarious.
“I woke up this morning Sunday and my email was full,” Chris Costello told CBS News. “I had a lot of people telling me, ‘Did you see this ‘SNL‘ thing?’ I took a look at it and me and my wife were like cracking up, I mean we couldn’t stop laughing. It was one of the best things I’ve seen.” Costello designed the font when he was 23 years old; he was just out of college and “struggling with some different life issues,” he said. “I was studying the Bible, looking for God and this font came to mind, this idea of, thinking about the biblical times and Egypt and the Middle East. I just started scribbling this alphabet while I was at work and it kind of looked pretty cool.”
Costello added, “I really think — and again if I can take this time to apologize to my brother and sister graphic designers — I believe it’s a well-designed font, it’s well-thought out.” It’s so well thought-out, in fact, that I bet Cameron rejects it for another font in the constantly-delayed Avatar 2. You thought Papyrus was bad? Wait until you have to read Na’vi in Comic Sans.
(Via CBS News)
