Fonts that give us the ick

Fonts are powerful. They convey tone, trust, emotion. They also have the power to instantly ruin everything.

You can spend six months crafting your identity, sweating over strategy, tone of voice, user journeys—And then someone picks ‘Lobster’. Now your high-growth fintech looks like a gastropub in Surrey.

Remember Ryan Gosling’s SNL meltdown over Avatar using Papyrus? That was not satire.

So today, we’re not here to educate. We’re here to judge.

Here are the fonts that triggered full-body cringe in the KOTA studio Slack.

If FS Kitty had a smell, it would be impulse-buy body spray from Claire’s. It’s giving glitter glue. It’s giving year 8 girlband. It’s also, somehow, vaguely threatening.

We don’t know what it’s trying to say—but it’s saying it in sparkly bubble letters, and we’re not sticking around to find out.

Technically clean. Logically usable.

Emotionally? No thank you.

Ubuntu looks like it came pre-installed on a Linux system. Nothing about it says brand trust. Everything about it says passive-aggressive project manager with an anime mousemat.

Lobster is what happens when someone discovers ligatures and immediately loses all restraint.

You’ve seen it on menu boards. You’ve seen it on yoga candle labels. You’ve seen it on posters that say Follow Your Bliss in six different type sizes.

It wants to be vintage. It wants to be “Brooklyn.”

It ends up looking like Etsy threw up.

It’s giving Call of Duty expansion pack.

It’s giving “Army surplus shop logo made in Microsoft Paint.”

Unless you’re actively branding camo tents or designing warning labels for landmines, stencil fonts need to sit this one out.

Extra demerits for using it in lowercase.

Grunge fonts (and everything on dafont.com tbh). If your font includes fake blood, cracked letters, or “spraypaint effects,” congratulations—you’re designing the next Saw sequel poster for a school film club.

We’re talking about fonts with names like “BloodStab Italic” or “Sk8orDie.ttf.” Fonts that look like they were designed by a 14-year-old who just discovered Slipknot.

No one even nominated this one.

It just entered the room, uninvited, like a wasp at a picnic.

If we see this in your brand identity, we’re assuming you also have a cat named Mr Tibbles and a shared Facebook account with your husband.

Some closing advice

Fonts are emotional. They speak before your brand does.
And some of them are speaking absolute nonsense.

Before anyone reads your tagline, your typeface has already made a first impression.
It’s told people who you are, what you stand for, and how seriously they should take you.

If you’re building something people are supposed to trust, you need fonts that deliver that message.

Unless your message is ‘we sell scented gel pens and chaos’, in which case—by all means, use FS Kitty.

Need help picking fonts that don’t give people trust issues?

Check out our branding work →