Siine Writer and the sarcastic font

Sarky, mildly annoyed and English people all over the world over rejoiced grumpily earlier this week at the news of the creation of a new sarcastic font.

A typographer, who operates from glennmcanally.com, has launched a new website as the “official site of the sarcastic font movement”, with the terminally sarcastic invited to download and use the new “arial sarcastic” font, which leans backwards in an attempt to denote sarcasm thus:

In a rather light-hearted manifesto, the founder writes of his decision to create the site.

 

 “For too long e-mails, instant messages, web pages and documents have been unable to fully communicate the subtleties of sarcasm. Text delivered without intonation fail to represent the rare form of language where the intended meaning is the opposite of the written word. 

“Over the internet we yell at each other with ALL CAPS and emphasize with bold and italics, but where is sarcasm? Where is the nuance, the elegance? We say it is time for a change. It's time for a revolution. It's time for a new font style!”

Much as with the launch of the "SarcMark" - essentially a punctuation mark to denote sarcasm (see above) - in 2010, the intention is playful. 

But there is a good point to be made here – and one that ties in closely with what Siine is doing.

Because who hasn’t, at some point, offended with a text or email that was meant to be sarcastic or joking, but totally missed its point?

Why does this happen? It’s simple - plain text misses vitally important parts of communication like tone, facial expression and even context. That is why emoticons have become so popular – they enable us to add emotion to our texts that words sometimes don’t express.

This is part of what we want to do with Siine Writer. We have created a keyboard to put emotion into your texts and Tweets, so you can really sound like you - sarcastic, happy, laconic or otherwise. 

We want nuance and we want elegance. So we welcome the sarcastic font movement  - with an ironic cheer.