Did you ever face that moment when a good text, flyer, logo or anything else looks awkward and you don’t know why? Choosing a font and mastering it requires more attention than it sounds because even a tiny little  character could make the difference between good and awful. In this article you can see 7 text designs which should be banned. What do you think? Is there any font that you hate it so much that you want to see it vanished from the face of the Earth?

This font has been around forever. It has even been featured as a default font in different word processors. This font doesn’t really have anything special to it—it’s just what gets used when you’re not sure what to use.

Comic sans is one of those “fun” fonts that gets used to add more pizazz to a document. The thing is, it doesn’t have any inherently cool qualities to it. It is what it is. There are other fonts that can do the job much better, such as Valium or Timoteos. Bury this font next to Helvetica in your typeface cemetery.

To be truthful, I really like this font. I am man enough to be able to concede that it has fallen victim to severe overuse. Whenever anyone wants to give a document an “old” feel to it, they turn to papyrus. Believe it or not, there are many other fonts you can use that accomplish the same purpose. Clerica and Licinia Aged are good alternatives.

This another one truly pierces my heart—like Papyrus, I really like this one. Unfortunately, so did the producers of hundreds of movies in recent years. A YouTube video highlights what it calls the “epic movie font” and shows how much it has been used. Movies from Master and Commander to Miracle have made use of this font in their promotion.

Now don’t get me wrong, a good underline can look good here and there. But the built-in underline feature in your word processor is never a good tool for making text stand out. If you wish to emphasize a word, try using the italics. If you must use an underline in a title (don’t ever use it in the text body except in hyperlinks), try (in Word 2010) clicking the Insert tab and then in the Illustrations subsection, clicking Shapes and then Line. While holding shift, draw a line under your title. Make sure you give the underline a little breathing room underneath your title.

A lot of people like to leave two spaces after their periods, question marks, and quotation marks. I don’t know how this fad got started, but I’m here to set an end to it. You don’t increase readability one bit by adding that extra space. What you do end up doing is creating holes in your paragraphs. This is one of the reasons I also try to avoid using completely justified text as well. When you add a double space after punctuation, your paragraph will have little holes. When you use a full or all justification on your text, you also tend to create these little rivers of spaces.

Don’t use it. Just about every word processor has a way to make text glow, have a metallic reflection, twist into weird angles, etc. These little tricks may look nice today, but they usually embarrass tomorrow. Keep it simple, elegant, and nice.

About the Author

Stephen Sharpe is a writer for MyCollegesandCareers.com. My Colleges and Careers can help you if you’ve got an eye for design and want to enroll in the best online universities.