Mary Bellamy

You know what? Tom Moran is right - the Internet does need a font critic. Or maybe he was saying that to shut me up as I embarked on yet another rant against Papyrus. (Seriously - why is that font everywhere I look? I hate it with a passion that most people cannot begin to understand.) Either way, I've decided to add Font Critic to my resume, and so I'd like to begin with a recent favorite font that is currently gracing both my resume and my latest promo card for dance classes.

Organic Elements is a recent offering from Nerys Evans at dafont. It's a serif font with some curved lines which a give the font a graceful look. The thickness of the stroke varies, as seen in the lowercase A, F and N, which reminds me of trying to write with a calligraphy pen as a child. In this case, the changes in width are deliberate and smooth.

While the spurs are quite basic, the ears lean down over the letters like a weeping willow. The beaks vary from standard to the elaborate swoops that begin the capital T and Z. The crossbars arc up gracefully in the capital H, and the tails in the lowercase Y are rather standard until the end, when they have small flourishes. Other small touches, such as the lack of a dot on the lowercase I, contribute to the font's unusual look.

The font falls a little short in usefulness because it has little to offer besides the basic alphabet. It includes numerals, though these seem on the small side, and basic punctuation, but no other characters are available. Also limiting its usefulness is the shape of the letters. Those graceful curves that catch the eye such as the capital W can easily bleed over onto another line of text. If you are using a desktop publishing program, you can easily move blocks of text to avoid this problem, but font lovers trying to design a flyer in a word processing program may not be so luck.

Overall, I really like this font. It's clean, but draws the eye in with its swoops and flourishes. The little unexpected blank spaces, such as the missing dot on the lowercase I or the bowl not quite touching the stem on the lowercase B also serve to grab the reader's attention. I think the name is quite appropriate, because the shape of the characters is reminiscent of the curves one finds in nature. I can easily see it being used to advertise a florist or a line of natural beauty products.

One odd note - while the font is called Organic Elements and downloads as such, I had trouble locating it after installing on my Mac. I finally found it listed as decorativefontFINAL, and I'm not certain how to change the name.