‘It’s Way Overused,’ Papyrus Font Designer Admits After Ryan Gosling ‘SNL’ Sketch

“It was not my intent to be used for everything,” Chris Costello said

snl saturday night live ryan gosling avatar papyrus
NBC

After Ryan Gosling and “Saturday Night Live” decided to take the Papyrus font to task this weekend, the creator is speaking out.

“It was not my intent to be used for everything — it’s way overused,” font creator Chris Costello said on CBS News Sunday.

Costello said he got inundated with emails after the skit, which showed Gosling obsessing over how the film “Avatar” just used the Papyrus font for its logo, aired Saturday night.

Over the course of the video, Gosling becomes more and more preoccupied with the apparent “laziness” of using a basic font as a movie title.

“Yeah, he just highlighted ‘Avatar,’ he clicked the drop down menu, and then he randomly selected Papyrus,” Gosling said in the skit. “Like a thoughtless child wandering by a garden yanking leaves along the way.”

“He just got away with it,” Gosling’s character narrated. “This man, this professional graphic designer. Was it laziness? Was it cruelty?”

“I took a look at it and me and my wife were like cracking up, I mean we couldn’t stop laughing. It was one of the best things I’ve seen,” Costello said.

Costello also went into how he created the font, which was depicted throughout the skit. At the end, the title card appears with the term “papyrus” written in comic sans, a joke on the hatred for the latter 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 said it was sold to both Microsoft and Apple, leading the way for it to be a default font on every computer.

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.”

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