Papyrus
Papyrus
Chris Costello, 1982
Display · A smoothie bar, a yoga studio, or Avatar.
Drawn in six months by a 23-year-old designer trying to imagine what writing on papyrus might look like, and bundled with enough software to become inescapable. Its use for the title of the highest-grossing film ever made produced a Saturday Night Live sketch that is now more famous than the film's typography. Costello has said he is bemused by all of it.
The facts
- Designed by
- Chris Costello
- Released
- 1982
- Classification
- Display
- What it signals now
- A smoothie bar, a yoga studio, or Avatar.
Where you have seen it
- Avatar's logo and subtitles
- An extraordinary number of small businesses
Other typefaces from the 1980s
| Typeface | Year | Designer | What it signals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arial | 1982 | Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders | A default. Something nobody chose. |
| Chicago | 1984 | Susan Kare | The original Macintosh, and the first iPod. |
| Trajan | 1989 | Carol Twombly | A film poster. Specifically a serious one, or a legal drama. |
This page describes the typeface rather than showing it. Displaying a specimen requires a licensed font file and almost none of these may be redistributed, so the descriptions name the letters to look at instead.
Common questions
- Who designed Papyrus?
- Chris Costello, in 1982.
- What is Papyrus used for?
- A smoothie bar, a yoga studio, or Avatar. You will have seen it on Avatar's logo and subtitles, An extraordinary number of small businesses.
Related pages
- Typefaces from the 1980s 4 here
- Cooper Black Oswald Bruce Cooper, 1922
- Impact Geoffrey Lee, 1965
- Comic Sans Vincent Connare, 1994
Sources
- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)