Stephanie and I walked to her apartment (on 105th) from the Big Nick's on 77th via Broadway on Monday - See route on left. (Yeah, I know Point A is somewhere around 66th. I was thinking that's where we started, but I was wrong - and I don't feel like fixing it. You get the idea.)

I decided to take a picture of every instance of Cooper Black I saw on our journey. To tell the truth, I was a little disappointed. We counted:

• 13 business signs (as in the primary name of business on an awning or otherwise above the entrance)
• 6 posters, sandwich boards, or supplementary information signs
• 1 truck

Of those, the majority (I'd say 80%) were north of 96th street. I thought there would be more. It was noted that we might have had better luck walking on Amsterdam. Hopefully I'll get the chance to try that sometime. Broadway is too consumed with its hoity-toity Copperplate to use much Cooper Black (barf).

I saw about 1,000 that were cooler than these while waiting for the bus in Chinatown and riding through Brooklyn and The Bronx today. Oh well. I don't mean to be too down. There were some nice specimens. Check out the gallery below.

Most typophiles would say, "you just do". But the differences aren't as obvious to some people.

To me, Century Gothic just looks like squished Futura:

The x-height of Century Gothic just a little bit taller - enough to make it look a little comical (in a bad way). In fact, the x-height of CG is a full 76% of the total cap height, while Futura's is only 64%:

Perhaps worst of all, the beautiful ascenders that make the relatively large x-height tolerable in Futura are all but missing from Century Gothic:

There are quite a few other differences too (many of CG's x-height letters are near perfect circles where Futura's are narrower, have more character and more pronounces stroke weights - see the 'e' for an example).

Century Gothic is a fine font, but no match for it's inspiration.

James Cameron's new movie Avatar might have the largest budget in the history of movie making that includes $150 million for marketing alone.

So what font did they choose to represent their vision and set the tone of the film? Papyrus.

Papyrus.

Wow. That's. just. awful.

It's all over the trailer too:

**UPDATE**
It looks like the font used in the movie is actually a hand-drawn custom font that just happens to look EXACTLY like Papyrus.

(that's Papyrus in red on top of the movie font)

I think this is actually worse than using Papyrus itself. With $150 million dollars, they came up with that.

It doesn't only look exactly like Papyrus, it's clearly based on it too. Look at this close up of the 'V'. The awful jagged edges of Papyrus follow the contours of the movie font perfectly.

Absolutely indefensible.

And Monica's for using the finest plastic bags available.

Cooper Black. I haven't found much use for it... and it can't logically be used in a HTML/CSS font stack (because many users probably don't have it installed and it has such a goofy width) but it's a great font.

I love the pseudo-lowercase numbers and non-whimsical playfulness achieved trough the absurdly fat baselines and (more importantly) bulbous serifs. With all that, it still conveys a certain amount of seriousness... or at least authority.

That serif on the bottom half of the capital "G" screams "don't mess with me!" while the top/bottom serifs on the 'H'/'I' say "what's up? we're cool, right? You can totally approach me".

And the 'A' is just laughing the whole time.

I think I saw it used in a Canadian Grocery Store Logo behind homeplate at the Roger's Center (Toronto Bluejays). That's what got me thinking about it.

Nice.