Fonts and Story Telling
Fonts and Storytelling Every good multimedia project tells a story, no matter whether its intent is business or pleasure and no matter what its topic may be. Before you begin creating any multimedia project, you should consider visiting http://www.storycenter.org to help you get into a story-telling mood. A link in that site will take you to a particularly well-told digital story at http://www.bubbe.com.
Text may be the most important, although least glamorous, medium that you can use for telling stories. All text appears in some font, which represents each letter, number, and symbol with a specific appearance. Some fonts are very fancy and some are very plain. The many different appearances are the reason why our computer contains a fairly typical 190 fonts and why literally thousands of other fonts are available. The large number and variety of available fonts is a hint that you should pick one that fits the mood of your story.
Unfortunately, the perfect font that you pick may not exist on your intended users' computers. Here are two true stories that illustrate the sort of problems that can result.
We recently attended a demonstration of an autobiographical project in which a young lady showed a multimedia class several highlights of her life. She led off with a "Menu" page that listed those highlights, such as "Travel" and "Men." At the bottom of each page in which she described one of these highlights, she had put a button saying "Return to Menu." As she demonstrated her project, she did not need to read the screens, because she knew what each button said, so she had no idea why the class roared with louder and longer laughter as she finished showing each of her highlights. She had selected a font that looked great on her home computer but that was just slightly smaller than the closest font on the classroom computer on which she was demonstrating her project. At the demonstration, every highlight's pages ended with a button saying "Return to Men."
Many years ago, we attended an executive presentation by a particularly egotistical member of the particularly snooty Research Division of the company for which we used to work. He had reduced the points about which he wanted to be most emphatic to bullets that used an exclamation point as their bullet symbol. As he presented his visual aids, nobody laughed when the different font available in Headquarters brought up his most important points with their bullet symbols replaced by question marks.
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