Alpha-Bitch
Do you remember eating Post Alpha-Bits cereal when you were a kid? I certainly do.
One thing I distinctly remember was taking a ‘D’ or an ‘M’ or a ‘P’ and nibbling the serifs off. Mind you, this was a good quarter-century before I learned what a serif was. I must have been a typographer prodigy!
Oddly, some Alpha-Bits letters come with serifs, and others do not. So is the cereal really a serif set or a sans serif? It’s unclear; or perhaps I’m expecting too much precision from Cold War era corn slurry extruding machinery.
One would hope that technological improvements over the past sixty years would allow greater precision in cereal production. We can send a man to the moon, land a probe on a comet, and ride around in automobiles that drive themselves and don’t consume gasoline; so why can’t we get Alpha-Bits in serif *or* sans serif?
Or more ambitious yet, in specific typefaces? What if Post were savvy enough to market Alpha-Bits in a Caslon edition, or a Garamond, or Futura? If they made a Helvetica cereal, would people love it or hate it? Could they introduce a fruit-flavored Frutiger? Would they be able to produce hairline strokes for a Bodoni?
But why stop there? Could we improve penmanship by feeding our kids Copperplate script? Or create a generation of refined aesthetes raised on a steady diet of Chancery and Trajan? Would kids fed Comic Sans and Exocet become a collection of morons? And let’s not forget to eat our Zapf Dingbats: a delicious part of this nutritious breakfast!
Alpha-Bits typeface editions: imagine the Impact that might have (pun very much intended)!
On the other hand, we don’t want to go too far. I suspect even Post Foods’ marketing team might shy away from trying to sell “Alpha-Bits: Akzidenz-Grotesk”.