The other day, I got a PowerPoint file, that I was tasked to “clean up.” Since I’m one of the few people left on the planet apparently, who knows how to correctly use PowerPoint, and its archaic method of style sheets and templates, I get this kind of request a lot.
Apparently, whomever had worked on this PowerPoint before it was turned over to me, also had no idea what they were doing. Margins completely inconsistent and text boxes and objects shifting all over the place upon scrolling though the slides. Colors, ever so slightly shifting between slides. And most blatantly, the fact that slides that were title slides in between categories had all their titles written in Lucida Calligraphy.
My boss stated “I don’t know what kind of person did this, but it needs to be fixed.”
I had to hold my tongue at the answer that immediately popped into my head.
Now I don’t intend on this turning into another “oh noes danny is such a racist” posts, but given my track record, experience in a wide variety of places, city I live in, and basically how often it is in fact, the case, but the only people who actually favor Lucida Calligraphy, are black women. I would wager money that the person who worked on the PowerPoint file before I did was a black woman, based on the usage of Lucida Calligraphy in the presentation. Not to mention someone with absolutely no understanding of cohesion and consistency, since the company in question’s identity is 100% Futura typeface in every single other application.
But anyway, as sure as hipsters love Helvetica Neue, Hollywood poster makers love Trajan, but anything that Christopher Nolan makes, the poster is always in Gotham, and anything that has the target audience of Sundance snobs and indie films use Pointy, black women love to use Lucida Calligraphy.
I’ve worked in corporate environments where in our Outlook email signatures, the gay designer would use all lower-case Helvetica, the stiffs in upper management stayed with generic old Times New Roman, but every single black woman had their email signatures in Lucida Calligraphy. When I worked at WCW, the vegan weirdo designer had his name in brackets and called himself “the” in all lower-case, the art director didn’t have text, but the inconsiderate image embed, but every single black woman used Lucida Calligraphy.
I’ve temped for companies in the real estate, oncology, finance and marketing industries. Black women love to use Lucida Calligraphy. I’ve worked in places where after I’m integrated into the email systems, and I start to get office-wide emails, if the name doesn’t give it away, I can usually tell a black woman if her email sig is in Lucida Calligraphy. I haven’t been wrong once.
The irony is that so often is the case, because Lucida Calligraphy is part of the package of fonts that is included when Microsoft Word is installed. But in the few instances where I worked in Macintosh environments, where Lucida Calligraphy isn’t available, guess what black women tend to gravitate towards instead, for their Entourage accounts?
Apple Chancery. No joke.
