About

Fancy Font refers to the typeface Fairwater, which resembles cursive and was made available to Tumblr users in an August 2017 update. It has been used in various shitposts on the site since its release.

Origin

Tumblr unrolled the feature on August 16th, 2017.^[1] According to Meme Documentation, this is also when users first noticed the feature and began applying it to various text-based memes. User doomy^[2] posted Oh, Worm? in the fancy font on August 17th and gained over 38,000 noted (shown below).

Spread

Over the following month, users began joking about the font. In particular, users joked about their confusion as to how it was done. The Tumblr staff reblogged a thread of people demanding to know how to do the "fancy font" on August 18th^[3] (shown below).

Others joked about how the Tumblr staff unrolled this feature in lieu of other features that Tumblr users have long asked for such as a proper blocking system. A post by 2toasts^[4] made a joke in that vein and gained over 26,000 notes (shown below, left). Another popular text post chain on the site joked about the font and gained over 150,000 notes^[5] (shown below, right).

Of note, the "fancy font" will only appear on the Tumblr dashboard and on certain blogs formatted to be able to show the font. To create the font, one must replace "< p >" in the HTML code of a text post with "< p class=“npf_quirky”>" (sans spaces).^[6]

Various Examples

[Editor's note: Examples taken from Meme Documentation, as the blog properly displays the cursive font]

Search Interest

External References