The typographer Matthew Butterick was so bothered by the use of Verdana in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” that he wrote a letter to Brad Bird, the film’s director.
I wouldn't call it defensive. Not overly defensive anyway. Seems like an appropriate response. The guy was needlessly pedantic. His issue wasn't that it was hard to read, just purely that he didn't personally like the font. His best argument is seriously that it's the Ikea font? Really?
I can understand it more when it's a tool or something you use frequently like the font on a phone, but it's literally a few minutes out of one movie.
Good points on both sides, but surely the correct decision by Bird would have been to delegate the font choice, to the head visual designer or some such.
Or maybe he already delegated, asked someone to make a shortlist of 5 fonts for him to choose from, and for some reason Verdana was the best on the list...
I highly recommend “Style: Toward Clarity and Grace,” by Joseph Williams. It’s by far the best advice on writing I’ve ever read. I learned about it from Norman Ramsey’s website [1], which has many other good resources. Another good book is the “HBR Guide to Better Business Writing,” by Bryan Garner.
It’s amazing that there aren’t many articles like this one. I wrote something very similar [1] last year because I simply couldn’t find a complete, step-by-step guide that addressed the details of forking, branching, etc.
www.triplicatefont.com