Papyrus Font Creator Defends Font After SNL 'Avatar' Sketch

Oct. 2, 2017, 1:06 p.m.

Creator of font says it's a very good font.

One of the best sketches on this weekend's season premiere of Saturday Night Live was the Julio Torres-written pre-taped segment in which host Ryan Gosling confronted the travesty of the Papyrus font being used in Avatar. "He just highlighted Avatar, he clicked the drop-down menu and then he randomly selected Papyrus, like a thoughtless child, just wandering by a garden yanking leaves along the way," Gosling said during the sketch. Now, the creator of the font has come out to defend his baby—although even he admitted he "couldn't stop laughing [at the sketch]. It was one of the best things I've seen."

Chris Costello told CBS that he received a flurry of emails after the sketch aired Saturday night. He explained the genesis of the font:

"I designed the font when I was 23 years old. I was right out of college. I was kind of just struggling with some different life issues, I was studying the Bible, looking for God and this font came to mind, this idea of, thinking about the biblical times and Egypt and the Middle East. I just started scribbling this alphabet while I was at work and it kind of looked pretty cool," Costello said.

He added, "I had no idea it would be on every computer in the world and used for probably every conceivable design idea. This is a big surprise to me as well."

He sold the font for $750 and still gets "very low" royalty payments from it since it became a default font set on computers since 2000. "I really think—and again if I can take this time to apologize to my brother and sister graphic designers, I'm a graphic designer as well, I'm an illustrator—I believe it's a well-designed font," he added.

Torres disagrees; the writer tweeted about this back in May:

Costello did admit that usage of the font in the years since, in mortgage ads, movie posters and construction logos, became "kind of out of control. It was not my intent to be used for everything—it's way overused." Now that Cameron is making four Avatar sequels simultaneously, we'll have plenty of Papyrus jammed down our eyeballs in the not-so-distant future.