Vintage vinyl transfer lettering sheets featuring Papyrus. It was an easy way to mockup typography in the days before desktop publishing. Letraset’s typeface sheets were the same thing, except aimed at commercial artists and designers instead of kids. If you were a kid during the ’70s and 1980s, in fact, you might already be familiar with Letraset’s action transfer system: you could buy a cheap action transfer set for Star Wars, Scooby-Doo, Marvel, and more, and transfer the colorful vinyl decals of your favorite characters on a pre-illustrated cardboard set. Papyrus Goes Vinylįounded in 1959, Letraset sold vinyl sheets covered in lettering which could be transferred to art just by rubbing. Except for one company: a small British company called Letraset that may have originated Lorum Ipsum text. So he sent it out to some of the big and small names in type distribution at the time. Costello was pleased enough with the finished design, which he christened Papyrus, to see if it could be turned into a font: his very first typeface. Something about the characters he had drawn spoke to him, so over the period of a few days, he worked on the letters, until he’d come up with an entire Roman alphabet in all caps. That was what started my interest in typography and fonts.” “Starting in elementary school, he’d get me to help him paint his signs, or illustrate brochures. “My father painted signs for IBM,” he says.
#COMIC PAPYRUS PROFESSIONAL#
The Accidental Typefaceīorn in Kingston, New York, in the 1960s, the son of a professional sign painter, Costello was connected to both computers and lettering at an early age. If he did, he probably would have asked for more than the equivalent of $2,500 today for it. He says he never dreamed Papyrus would end up installed on over a billion computers around the world. So what does Costello think of having designed the “other most hated font” in the world? “There have definitely been days I wish I never sold the rights,” he laughs, acknowledging the font definitely has its share of critics.
It has become a punchline on television shows and featured in video games like the 2015 indie RPG, Undertale (which stars an eponymous skeleton who only speaks in Papyrus word balloons). Multiple websites exist just to ridicule it. Like Connare’s font, Papyrus is famous for being misused, especially on things like signs, business cards, and letterheads. Sometimes called “the other most hated font in the world”, Papyrus is the typeface that font comedians move onto when their Comic Sans jokebook gets a little dog-eared. I never intended Papyrus to be used for mortgage companies and construction logos.
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