Have you or a fellow designer been personally victimized by Cooper Black or an iteration of it? Okay, but for real guys, let’s tone it down a little. Don’t get me wrong, Cooper is a great font. A nice chunky old-style serif designed in the 1920s with newspaper and magazine advertisers in mind. It was one of the first types with a round serif, influencing numerous heavy round serif fonts, even today. Cooper Black was named “pop culture’s favorite font” in an article by Vox in 2020. The font is used in the Tootsie Roll logo, Garfield comics, and on the Beach Boys album cover for Pet Sounds, just to name a few notable occurrences. It’s nostalgic, comfortable, quirky - easily fitting in with the resurgence of all things retro.
But this is literally the origin story of Comic Sans. It’s not a bad font, it really isn’t, it was overused and now it’s hated. It seems like every time I open Instagram I see a new branding project with another iteration of Cooper Black. This one has more dramatic swooshes and that one is wavier and on and on and on. Where is the originality? What is setting your brand apart from every other person using one of the 100+ versions of this chunky rounded serif font? There are SO many fonts out there, literally so many. If you are absolutely set on that look and feel that represents your identity, well cool! But if not, don’t pick an iteration of Cooper just because it’s trendy - I promise with just a teeny bit of digging you will find a font that not only better represents you or your brand but one that also looks nothing like Cooper mfing Black.
