Mistral, a brilliant yet widely-abused typeface that could rise again

Forget Comic Sans and Papyrus, writes John Brownlee. Mistral is the font to hate.

This is a font created to exemplify everything sophisticated and elegant about postwar France. Yet over the course of the 21st century, Mistral has become positively unmoored a font just as likely to be used on a cheap tube of lip gloss or the flickering neon sign of an Amsterdam porn shop as it is on the label of your sandals, or the side of your uncles yacht.