For the Love of Curlz MT, An Ode On Its 30th Birthday

Words: Constance McDonald

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It is thirty years since the birth of a fabulous glyph – a swirl that haunts, delights, provokes and perplexes. Happy birthday to Curlz MT!

Most tell you she’s a crime against typography (Curlz MT is definitely a girl). They whisper her name alongside Comic Sans, that other jestered outcast (boo, hiss!). They imply that she’s the typographic equivalent of a sugar rush, a declaration of aesthetic bankruptcy, that her letters writhe and twist like eels in a bucket.

But I say, where is the poetry and wildness in your precious Helvetica? Curlz MT was never a font for the faint of heart.

Let us begin at the genesis of this spiralling enigma. It is 1995. Steve Matteson and Carl Crossgrove have conjured Curlz MT. They envision it adorning posters, menus, and t-shirts. And, with a deliberate quirk, they name it Curlz MT, replacing the ‘s’ with a ‘z’ – this is a stylistic tic which permeated a certain slice of late 90s/Y2K pop culture, notably Bratz dolls, which debuted a few years later, in 2001.

The designers claimed no direct inspirations for Curlz MT – yet subtle, undeniable echoes of Art Nouveau resonate within its forms. That artistic movement, which flourished between 1890 and 1910 across Europe and the United States, celebrated organic shapes and flowing lines, much like the exaggerated curves of Curlz MT. Consider, for example, the storefront at 51 Rue Jean Bellegambe, Douai, France, designed by Albert Pèpe in 1906, with its curves that mimic vines. The serifs of Curlz MT embrace a similar sense of playful movement and a departure from rigidity. Its creators have said that they sought to inject a “unique, festive touch.” 
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

“But I say, where is the poetry and wildness in your precious Helvetica? Curlz MT was never a font for the faint of heart.”

As well as Curlz MT, however, Matteson created the buttoned-up Segoe, the stoic Cambria, and most recently, the default Office suite font Aptos, and has turned his back on Curlz MT stating it was not his proudest moment. But, Steve! You have given us not a moment, but a monument. A monument to the untamed, the unruly, the delightfully inappropriate.

In the 1990s Microsoft gave away fonts as if they were a handful of sugared plums to any child who asked. And Curlz MT, this twisting, undulating angel, was among them. Suddenly the tools of the designer’s trade, once reserved for the experts, were placed in the grasp of anyone with a mouse and a screen.

The design elite recoiled. What is design if not the careful consideration of form and function? What is typography if not the art of making the written word legible, harmonious, and appropriate? Curlz MT, serpentine and terminal, offered none of these.

Imagine, for a moment, the home computer of your childhood. Maybe it is on the kitchen table surrounded by your sibling’s worksheets and the crumb-laden plate of an afterschool toastie. Maybe it is in the study, or, maybe, if you are an only child, unsupervised in your bedroom. The hard drive the size of a microwave is purring. Microsoft Word is embedded into the system, along with its (now deceased) siblings Publisher and Movie Maker. Only about twenty fonts are at your fingertips. 

You choose the rebel, the disruptor. You click, and the letters transform into a swirling anomaly. Curlz MT.

Curlz MT dared to be different. It dared to swirl. It dared to be itself. 

You chose Curlz MT for Powerpoint presentations at primary school. Sure, perhaps inappropriately for a slideshow on ‘Bullying’. And, probably just once, you did not contain its exuberance, and used it for big blocks of text printed out for a poster about Florence Nightingale. 

Curlz MT was used indiscriminately: from wedding invitations to business cards. The professional designer, with their carefully chosen typefaces and their subtle kerning (try kerning Curlz MT!) were clutching their pearls. 

In 2023, the Journal of Visual Communication Research published a piece, ‘The Perception of Qualities in Typefaces,’ which wrangled together a unified dataset, allowing for comparison across 34 studies that asked participants to rate 229 qualities in 635 typefaces. In one study, Curlz MT was rated the ‘happiest’ and ‘warmest’ typeface. It also stood out as one of the most ‘feminine’ typefaces. But in the same breath, it was also perceived as one of the ‘weakest’ typefaces. 

On Reddit, the digital oracle of public opinion, Curlz MT is routinely condemned as incredibly unprofessional. They cite lists of the most hated fonts, where Curlz MT often is second only to Jokerman, another resident of the typographic underworld. 

They are lumped together in their shared rejection by the design establishment, but their rebellion takes different forms. Jokerman is a full-throated roar and a visual tantrum. It screams for attention with its jagged edges and carnival enthusiasm. When Curlz MT glides, Jokerman clatters. But, I am not here to talk about that clown.

Curlz MT was the font your auntie used for church bake sale flyers. It was the font that adorned the laminated (kinda sticky) kids’ menus of cafés that served bowl lattes, chicken and cranberry paninis, and monstrous portions of nachos. Curlz MT was the font your dad picked for the printed invitations you brought to school to hand out to your entire class for your seventh birthday party. It featured heavily on community bulletin boards at the supermarket on posters for neighbourhood pot lucks and school fairs. If an independent shop in a small town used the font for their signage, they probably sold mood rings. 

It was, in its own way, the font of the people. 

It has become a relic of the digital age, a symbol of a time when design was less of a craft and more a free-for-all. It evokes a certain nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the early days of personal computing, when anything seemed possible. The rounded forms, the gentle curves, they speak of a certain innocence, a childlike naivety. Perhaps this is part of its appeal. Curlz MT offers a soft, comforting embrace.

Using Curlz MT feels like twirling a piece of hair around your finger in maths class on a Friday afternoon. It feels like using the ‘mist’ setting on the hose. 

“Jokerman is a full-throated roar and a visual tantrum. It screams for attention with its jagged edges and carnival enthusiasm. When Curlz MT glides, Jokerman clatters. But, I am not here to talk about that clown.”

Lana Del Rey’s album cover for Blue Banisters features a font accused of being Curlz MT. To the untrained eye, I get it. It is twirly. It does feel like Curlz MT, or at least a ghost of it, or a cousin, or a memory of a cousin. Lana acts as an archaeologist of the digital attic presenting this font to us. Was it a deliberate misstep? Is it camp? That word, a loose garment, a drape of knowing irony. To make the ugly beautiful, or at least, interesting. To hold up the cheap, the gaudy, and say, look. Lana Del Rey, she knows, and digs up the essence of the reliced font to present a fossilised giggle. 

Curlz MT, with its over-the-top ornamentation and its unapologetic lack of subtlety can be appreciated, perhaps, for its sheer audacity. Curlz MT has achieved a level of notoriety that many meticulously crafted fonts can only dream of. Its infamy has ironically cemented its place in the cannon of digital typography. It is to be remembered, and if we dig a little deeper, it echoes many images and symbols from the art world.

Consider, for example, Curlz MT’s uppercase L. A column. A fluted, spiraling scroll. Not the rigid, vertical serif of your precious Garamond. It echoes Ionic capitals at the top of the columns at the Erechtheum (you probably saw it in Athens during your ‘Euro summer’). It also evokes Robert Smithson’s 1970 land art piece ‘Spiral Jetty’. 

Yes, let us not dismiss the spiral, the very essence of Curlz MT, as mere whimsy. The uppercase O, particularly, is a spiral… ancient and sacred, a symbol of eternity. Beloved by Hilma Af Klint, it is the nautilus shell, the ammonite, the labyrinth, the swirling nebulae: a testament to the mathematical poetry of nature. It is that blue ‘cyclone’ emoji 🌀 released in 2010, the bent wood of the No.21 Rocking Chair by Thonet, and the Sankofa (curly heart) on wrought iron fences. 

Like all of these designs, Curlz MT asks: “What is life without a little bit of curl?” Without a touch of the absurd? Without a hint of the delightfully, gloriously, utterly kitsch?

Happy birthday, Curlz MT. I know your creator is not proud of you, but I am. I will stand beside you, defend your honour, study your ancient swirls, and analyse your misbehaving serifs. You are gorgeous little symbol of a time when design was less a science, and more a wild experiment at a home computer.