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The eagerly anticipated 2009 Philosophical Gourmet report has been released recently. For those who are unfamiliar, the gourmet is a ranking of anglophone philosophy departments. As usual, the rankings have been scrutinized and discussed endlessly on blogs and in real-life. But I want to examine one shortcoming that I think has not been noted:
The typeface used in the logo.
(old logo)
(new logo)
To the best of my approximation (with the help of Identifont and WhatTheFont), the old logo uses Alinea Sans Bold (see comment below) and the new logo uses Arial Narrow Bold. (The oldest logo seems to use Univers Bold.)
The question is, why the change? As anyone who lists Helvetica as one of their favorite movies on their facebook profile knows, Arial sucks. That, and the fact that the old logo was perfect serviceable, makes the change mysterious. Even on a first pass, I thought the old logo looked better. I especially liked R. So I think the Philosophical Gourmet has really taken a step back this year. Bummer!
