And the award goes to...

I've decied to begin a new tradition with my blog. Each January I will award a particular font as the Most Overused Font of the (previous) Year. The candidates will mostly comprise of stylized fonts and not target certain san-serif fonts (otherwise Helvetica Neue or Gill Sans will always win). Even certain text serif fonts will be excluded (such as any Garammond family, Bodoni family, and yes even Mrs. Eaves). And most definitely all system fonts will be excluded.

So without much further ado, I will announce the winner.

It's Adobe's Rosewood.

"There were many typeface designs based on Clarendon letterforms seen in type catalogs from 1866 to 1875. Adobe’s Rosewood, released in 1994, is modeled after a chromatic design from William Page in 1874. (“Chromatic” or multicolored typefaces were first created by carefully registering and overprinting two or sometimes three versions of each letter in different colors to produce a flamboyant appearance). Rosewood’s Regular version is designed to overlay the Fill version for two-color printing."

If you watch fonts in publications like Donald Trump watches his hairline, you'd have noticed the proliferated use of this slab-sarif typeface in both it's styles throughout the year. (Yes, it's a shame I don't have any examples of the dozen or so examples that I'm referring to but if you paid attention like I said you should, then you know what I'm talking about.)

Have I mentioned how much I love Linotype's FontExplorer X? It's what is used to display Rosewood in my screenshot (in case you were curious).

*Incidentally, if I were doing this award for 2005, Rosewood would have won for that year also.