Long Live Lobster
We make fun of Lobster for being overused, but is popularity such a bad thing?
Several years ago now, I was editing a newspaper feature that required me to find a snazzy font that would scream, from afar, “COCKTAILS.” It was to be a regular feature reviewing the newest, fanciest watering holes, and it didn’t take me long on the DaFont Top 100 before I found Lobster. It was perfect: retro but not classical, fun but not silly, smooth but not loopy. It became our signature cocktails font.
Fast-forward a bit and a strange thing started happening. Lobster started following me. It began to inhabit my dreams and haunt my waking moments. I couldn’t turn a street in London without seeing it looming over me.
This had happened to me before, of course. It was the late ’00s and the font was Bleeding Cowboys — possibly the most horrendous typeface committed to the internet — which I had used on my Harry Potter website (yes, I was a child). And then, suddenly, it was everywhere, befouling adverts and shop awnings and flyers for club nights. Occasionally still, I see it out in the wild and I get flashbacks to another time, another font…
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the ubiquity of Lobster. It had been, after all, on lists of the most popular fonts almost 10 years ago, where lazy designers go to…
