Tumblr Media Violation Images (Font Identification)
Tumblr has a number of placeholder images it uses when an image is removed. The most famous, by far, is the community guideline violation image. "This content has been removed for violating Tumblr's Community Guidelines."
Most of you have likely seen this image, if not in its intended place, by someone using it for the aesthetic. Did you know that this is actually an old variant, and there was at least one even older variant?
These are all the iterations I could find for this specific media violation image, the 500x375 pixel Community Guidelines violation image, in order. All of these files are called community_guidelines_v1_500.png and the versions can be found on the Internet Archive. The newest version is also called user_guidelines_v1_500.png.
The transition from the first variant to the second happened sometime on January 3rd, 2019, specifically between 16:52 (last) and 23:30 (first) GMT. The transition from the second to the third was on July 16th, 2024 between 14:03 (last) and 14:58 (first) GMT. Differing resolutions of this image seem to have been replaced at various different times.
The first iteration's gray background style is consistent with the other media violation images available at that time. Each had a custom desaturated color graphic in the center of the image, with the text of the image as a centered subtitle. The current style is made up of a single chunk of left-justified text over several lines in the upper left corner on a dark blue background. The start of the text as well as the final period is colored according to a scheme; blue for community guidelines, pink for copyright, orange for privacy. The colored text is for the preamble "this content has been removed for" with the reason being in white. The "all" violation does not match this format exactly, instead its old iteration is simply text, and its new iteration does not have colored text. Notably, both series are color coded, but the color coding was changed.
The community guidelines violation image is the only one with three variants. All of the others only have two.
copyright_v1_400.png
privacy_v1_500.png
all_v1_100.png
The fonts
Notably, if you look very closely at the new variants you can see that almost all of them have their i-dots (tittles) off center, shifted to the left, with the right edge aligned with the right edge of the i body. Additionally, in all of the images the apostrophes are relatively ornate for the otherwise grotesque sans-serif typeface. The only new style image which does not have the tittles off-center is the newest variant of the community guidelines image.
The original images use a Helvetica typeface, likely Helvetica Neue. However, the text is not simply typed out in Helvetica, the apostrophes seemingly have all been manually replaced with the comma character. I suspect manual replacement since I do not believe Helvetica to have a style option for replacing the apostrophe with a comma.
The new variants use a custom typeface called Favorit-Tumblr. Similarly to the original variants, the apostrophes have been replaced with commas. I think the off-centered tittles lend credence to the idea that the apostrophes were manually replaced.
Sources
All of the images were taken from the Internet Archive. A full list of all indexed media violation images can be found at this link, which includes various resolutions of each. The exact change times were found using a manual binary search in a few minutes.
