As an amateur web developer and aspiring author, I can say with some certainty, font and size controls are a double edged sword. There is a very fine line between formatting your text to be innovative and appealing, and gaudy and gauche. But it’s a dangerous road you must dare to tread, because absolutely nothing could be worse than an unformatted block of text in Times New Roman with 12 type face. Even a short paragraph will appear more daunting that War and Peace, and any context or rhetoric that you could hope to glean from that perfectly bland piece of prose would be lost on the wayside. By employing varying font sizes, variations in alignment, and the ever awesome horizontal rule, you can control the cohesion of your piece. The only rule is innovation. If you stick with the same tricks, they tend to get stale, so one should always look to adopt new stylizations, and jettison old trends. A perfect example of the cyclical nature of stylization is the ever hated font: Comic Sans. Even typing it feels gross. Comic Sans. BUT: Did you know that this fonts origins arose from the pages of “Watchmen” (1987) a widely celebrated Graphic Novel published by DC that is the only comic book on Time’s Magazines’s “All-Time 100 Greatest Novels List” (2005). Even the most detested font in the world had some glory days, and if the cyclical nature of stylization holds true, we may see it once again.
