The shoddy fonts of low-budget press releases

When you send out press releases to savvy film review sites, you can't really fool anyone that the movie you're advertising is better than what we would have called "straight to video" back in the day. You, dear reader, won't be surprised to learn that I receive a lot of such press releases from PR people, since they want coverage of their movies a lot more than the big distributors seem to want it -- even though we would seem more likely to give those movies bad reviews.

But just because the movie's probably bad, does that mean that the press release also has to look so shit?

As if typefaces themselves cost money, these press releases tend to rely on blocky, unsophisticated fonts, and usually compound the matter by justifying the text, such that the spacing between words is weird and stretches the words so that the final letter on the right side aligns down the page. Which is not a sophisticated look. 

Because it is necessary for me to provide examples, but not necessary for me to crush the spirits of these little movies, nor of the nice people who try to get me to review them, I will block out identifying information from these examples.

This is another one of those that thinks I live in London, as I discussed here. 

How bad does that third line of text look? If you have to go for justified text, there are more sophisticated ways of doing it, such as slightly spacing out the letters in the words so you don't notice it as much. Not leaving giant spaces between the words that are two to three times greater than all the other spaces in the paragraph.

It turns out I've deleted a lot of the offending emails, so I don't have a huge number of other options to choose from. But here's another that doesn't look nice:

Why are you screaming at me? I think you can use all caps if you have to, but then choose a less severe font. 

It just strikes me as odd that there is no one out there who has said "Hey, you have a shit movie? I can dress it up and make it real nice." This is an imperfect comparison, but it's kind of like how there are very few -- I'm not going to say none at all -- scammers who can send out fake emails that don't include typos. You just get one scammer who is semi competent at imitating a real email, and you'll have scads more personal information you can release on the dark web. 

Okay, I'll let these poor PR people off the hook today.