7 ms·

Why you hate Comic Sans

jheriko 11y ago
in my experience, people hate it because it is used so often in places where it is inappropriate. a lot of the analysis here is authoritative but off the mark as well... that e is the most readable letter when blurred to me, and its the properties which are criticised which make it the case. that is it, nothing more complicated than that.
Ueland 11y ago
I simply cannot take anything written on a "design" website seriously when it's filled with 1 full page pop up and another half page pop up.
paulpauper 11y ago
there's nothing funny about comic sans
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
codingdave 11y ago
I'd give a simpler answer - because it looks like a kid's handwriting.
- protomyth 11y ago
  We used it quite a bit in the 90's when we ran a 0-3 child/family program for just the reason you gave.
- coldtea 11y ago
  That's the intent though, which completely flew over the "critics" (and I use the term loosely) head...
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    No, not really. The problem is people using it in places where a kid-handwriting font makes no sense.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      That's what you say the problem is, and I could agree, but TFA never makes such a distinction.
phpguys 11y ago
This was a really long, un-needed technical way of saying "it was cool once but it got tired with the times." Just because this designer thinks that Comic Sans sucks, doesn't mean it didn't have a place all those years ago.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  The writer said quite clearly that it did have a place all those years ago.
daveguy 11y ago
I really don't mind comic sans. I notice it, because it's cool to hate it and it gets a lot of attention. But really I don't find it terrible. Edit: kerning, small text readability, etc are all stretching it a bit. The main reasons are -- overuse and unprofessional look. I wouldn't use it in a resume, but otherwise I don't hate or even mind it.
- sethammons 11y ago
  This, and the same for papyrus. It is everywhere.
- rer0tsaz 11y ago
  No, no, the cool thing to do now is to defend it. You claim that critics just don't understand its purpose, even if they mention it multiple times and are only criticising misuse. Then you use it ironically in your professional presentations to show that you are above the hoi polloi, both of today and of 15 years ago.
dthakur 11y ago
It's a font.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
DonHopkins 11y ago
We shipped a game called The Sims that used Comic Sans all throughout, that sold pretty well in spite of the font. In case you can't stand to read Comic Sans with your eyes, I also made an external screen scraping utility called Simplifier that reads Comic Sans text off the screen, and catalogs and recites the product descriptions with a speech synthesizer. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imu1v3GecB8&feature=youtu.be&t=3m15s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imu1v3GecB8&feature=youtu.be...
silliconeheart 11y ago
I love comic sans, I find it very readable.
Spooky23 11y ago
I get it, Comic Sans is tacky. But so is the fetishizing of Helvetica.
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  At least Helvetica has a whole movie about it! [1] "It's hard to evaluate it. It's like being asked what you think about off-white paint. It's just there. It's hard to get your head around something that's that big." "And most people who use Helvetica use it because it's ubiquitious. It's like going to McDonalds instead of thinking about food. Because it's there. It's on every street corner. So let's eat crap, because it's on the corner." [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JkpYgjbYRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JkpYgjbYRg
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    I knew Design[tm] had won the world when a generic fast food joint near me had words like "Burger" and "Chicken" styled in classic designer fonts and sandblasted into frosted glass on its windows. Definitely no Comic Sans.
    - DonHopkins 11y ago
      And there's the dystopian generic food of Repo Man [1]. [1] http://i.imgur.com/w6ODNaQ.png http://i.imgur.com/w6ODNaQ.png
      - bitwize 11y ago
        The most entertaining bit about the movie The Host (based on the Stephenie Meyer novel) was the fact that in a world ruled by Souls -- alien beings who possess humans and are incapable of dishonesty -- you go to a store marked "store". You pick up a bag of potato chips marked "potato chips", a jug of milk marked "milk" and a can of chicken soup marked "chicken soup". You walk out without paying for anything because the owners of "store" know you won't take more than you need and are providing for everybody. Oh yeah, all the labels are in Helvetica bold. Anything fanvier might be a way to get a dishonest advantage.
Absentinsomniac 11y ago
One of my CS professors had us writing papers, and we got extra points if it was in comic sans. I had to specifically install a ms fonts package for it. Ever since I've liked it, but don't actually use it. I think the whole thing surrounding comic sans is incredibly strange and I'm pretty sure I'm missing some context or something.
- superswordfish 11y ago
  It's the same as with Java, PHP, ketchup, strip malls, pop music, professional wrestling, etc. which are usually criticized with minimal mental effort. The opinion is used as a signal that you're not "one of them," that is, a commoner, though to a thinking person they establish you as exactly that, somebody who is incapable of nuanced thinking.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - ldonley 11y ago
    This is too true. Best is when the opinions on these are formed with no previous experience with it. I have to use Perl at work and whenever someone finds out they say "I'm sorry that you have to use that terrible language!" Sure, I would prefer to use Python, but Perl has some useful features that other languages don't do as well which is why I use it. Conveniently, nobody who comments to me about Perl has ever actually used it. Same with when I have used Java in the past.
frik 11y ago
Comic Sams actually shipped with Internet Explorer 3-5 and Win98+. The font was meant for Comic Chat which came with IE3-5, an IRC chat application. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat You have to install IE on Win95 to get the font. IE4 included the Win95 shell upgrade which meant it turned Win95 to look like Win98. So a lot of people installed it.
coldtea 11y ago
The article is really the antithesis of a good critique. The comparison to Helvetica and Garamond misses the point of Comic Sans, which is to be a casual, friendly and playful (as opposed to professional, austere, serious, business-like) font that looks more handwritten than typographed (like the handwritten captions in pulp comics of yore). Even the kerning and height issues they point can be explained for that. Perfect kerning and proportions would ruin the illusion of it being handwritten and childlike. As to why all the hate, it's easy: middle class people with any "artistic" or "creative" inspirations (and I use the term loosely) will jump at the first chance to feel more sophisticated than the great unwashed masses. And designers are the very epitome of that crowd [1]. And most will just jump on any bandwagon related to such a cause (notice the hundreds of anti-Comic Sans blog posts, articles, even t-shirts), without thinking the issue thoroughly and trying to understand neither the original intent nor how and why people actually use the font in practice (which is even more important). The real question to ask is not why designers and hipsters "hate" it, but why the huge "unwanted masses" adopted it with such eagerness. But that would imply that the average designer also has something to learn from the people, instead of preaching his dictums (which most of the time are not tied to any science or real world observations at all) of "what should work" and what "they should like" to them. [1] The same people that, in their web incarnation, blathered on and on about "semantic markup", missing the point of both "semantic" -- a word that they repeated as parrots from one another after they learned it from a few misguided trend-setters -- and "markup", which is not supposed to be where you convey semantics). This, now mostly subdued trend, kept the web 5 to 10 years behind -- thank god for SPAs, flex and grid layouts and the like.
- Avshalom 11y ago
  To be fair the bandwagon started rolling for good-ish reason. For ages (probably still) Windows lacked any decent headline font, which meant a lot of shit got put into comic sans that shouldn't have. There used to be a blog full of funeral announcements and pink-slips printed in comic sans. You take a crap ____ (font in this case, but word/joke/phrase anything) and over use it and over use it in wildly inappropriate ways and it starts engendering hate real quick.
  - 11y ago
jordigh 11y ago
Meanwhile, over in Lobsters, the OpenBSD devs claim responsibility for the recent wave of Comic Sans attacks: https://lobste.rs/s/0dxurz/new_hat_request_system/comments/phl1qg#c_phl1qg https://lobste.rs/s/0dxurz/new_hat_request_system/comments/p...
resoluteteeth 11y ago
In my opinion, the real reason Comic Sans is bad has nothing to do with the actual design of Comic Sans. The simple fact is that it gets annoying to read significant amounts of text if they are in fonts if they deviate too far from the normal standards. Fonts that try to emulate handwritten cursive, for example, are even more annoying. It's just that of the fonts that most people have pre-installed, Comic Sans may be unique in terms of being in the danger zone where it's almost normal enough that people try to use it for actual documents, but different enough that people forced to read those documents get irritated. This article is more along the lines of "Arial is bad," which may be true in terms of font design, but isn't the sort of thing normal people are going to go around wearing t-shirts about.
Cenk 11y ago
You know what I also hate? Popovers on websites asking for my email address. I get it, you read somewhere that you‘re supposed to build an email list to grow your audience. Just let me read in peace.
- theandrewbailey 11y ago
  I also hate Youtube embeds that won't fullscreen without watching the video on Youtube.
  - dublinben 11y ago
    I assumed it was a YouTube embed, but it wouldn't load because I don't have flash. I guess I'll never get to see this guy's amazing presentation.
crb 11y ago
Designer Craig Rozynski has created a new version of Comic Sans, which fixes many (most?) of the typographical problems pointed out in this article: http://comicneue.com/ http://comicneue.com/ There's a good interview with Rozynski on the subject: http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2014/april/the-neue-comic-sans/ http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2014/april/the-neue-...
- Avshalom 11y ago
  Eh, the bold is alright but I think the regular version loses one of Comic Sans' most important qualities: it doesn't develop weird/anemic proportions when used at large sizes or in all caps. and personally I think the 'e' is too aggressive.
khaled 11y ago
I don’t hate Comic Sans and never understood all the hate, it a rather nice font actually.
- tomelders 11y ago
  It's my goto font when typesetting speech bubbles for my dank memes. Or when I want to give another designer an aneurism. People just need to chill out. The more people use Comic Sans, the better a pro-designers work looks against the "corporate-but-also-fun powerpoint" background radiation.
larrymcp 11y ago
Hmmm, I think the premise is way off-base here. People don't even hate Comic Sans... they hate how often it's used inappropriately. The article tries to construct this huge overwrought analysis of the font itself, but the font is fine. It's the tone-deaf way that people use Comic Sans that causes ridicule.
- 7Z7 11y ago
  No, lots and lots of people really do hate Comic Sans, independent of use.
kristiandupont 11y ago
Is it just me or is Comic Sans such an easy target that it seems silly to be elitist about it? It's like if a bunch of film critics kept bringing up how bad Batman and Robin was.
- CM30 11y ago
  Well, the internet critics like to bring up how bad Batman and Robin was as a movie. There's a reason 'Bat Credit Card' became a meme back in the day. But yeah, it's an easy target.
LarryMade2 11y ago
Used it for years for a child care related newsletter - it is a nice readable informal font. Worked well for the audience.
JabavuAdams 11y ago
Because we're social creatures and we like to belittle out-groups to make ourselves feel special?
leonatan 11y ago
I couldn't continue reading this article after the third popup on mobile. Idiotic site design.
OJFord 11y ago
I've never before seen someone making the mistake of saying 'Legos' go so far as to capitalise it and append a registered trademark icon. LEGO is a trademark; 'LEGOS' is not.
jrcii 11y ago
This was the funniest thing to me, CERN released the Higgs boson finding in Comic Sans http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/4/3136652/cern-scientists-comic-sans-higgs-boson http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/4/3136652/cern-scientists-com...
brashrat 11y ago
sorry in advance for posting a contrary opinion, but this runs contrary to "both sides" of what I hear in the debate and I feel like it's worth sharing, I can't be the only one...: if you want to make a "warning" sign, like "Caution: electrical hazard", my claim is that it will get noticed MORE and serve as a better warning if you display it in Comic Sans. Reason, it looks like an actual person went to the trouble to warn you, as opposed to some overly cautious liability dodging corporate (or OSHA or insurance company) warning. And I'm not saying it's perfect or doesn't have a lot of other fails, but it's my goto font for signage because it's ubiquitous and it gets the message across. I'm mystified by people who only wish to be warned in ... in what, serif or sans, I don't even know?
polpo 11y ago
Comic Sans is a terrible font, even when used for its intended purpose. It has a really off-kilter awkwardness that doesn't evoke any sense of youth or playfulness. The perfect argument against Comic Sans is Chalkboard [1], a font created by Apple to have the same look but fixes everything wrong with it. Vincent Connare, the creator of Comic Sans, uses it as an example of how great Comic Sans is, saying "if Comic Sans is bad why make something similar." [2] But they made something similar because it was bad and needed fixing. Chalkboard shows that the concept of a casual handwriting/comic font is valid, it's just that Comic Sans blew the execution. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalkboard_(typeface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalkboard_(typeface) [2] http://www.connare.com/whycomic.htm http://www.connare.com/whycomic.htm
xufi 11y ago
I hated it since I knew it was wrong when I used it for an paper in 3rd grade
cafard 11y ago
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole

in my experience, people hate it because it is used so often in places where it is inappropriate. a lot of the analysis here is authoritative but off the mark as well... that e is the most readable letter when blurred to me, and its the properties which are criticised which make it the case. that is it, nothing more complicated than that.

Ueland 11y ago

I simply cannot take anything written on a "design" website seriously when it's filled with 1 full page pop up and another half page pop up.

paulpauper 11y ago

there's nothing funny about comic sans

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

codingdave 11y ago

I'd give a simpler answer - because it looks like a kid's handwriting.

protomyth 11y ago
We used it quite a bit in the 90's when we ran a 0-3 child/family program for just the reason you gave.
coldtea 11y ago
That's the intent though, which completely flew over the "critics" (and I use the term loosely) head...
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  No, not really. The problem is people using it in places where a kid-handwriting font makes no sense.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    That's what you say the problem is, and I could agree, but TFA never makes such a distinction.

phpguys 11y ago

This was a really long, un-needed technical way of saying "it was cool once but it got tired with the times." Just because this designer thinks that Comic Sans sucks, doesn't mean it didn't have a place all those years ago.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago
The writer said quite clearly that it did have a place all those years ago.

daveguy 11y ago

I really don't mind comic sans. I notice it, because it's cool to hate it and it gets a lot of attention. But really I don't find it terrible. Edit: kerning, small text readability, etc are all stretching it a bit. The main reasons are -- overuse and unprofessional look. I wouldn't use it in a resume, but otherwise I don't hate or even mind it.

sethammons 11y ago
This, and the same for papyrus. It is everywhere.
rer0tsaz 11y ago
No, no, the cool thing to do now is to defend it. You claim that critics just don't understand its purpose, even if they mention it multiple times and are only criticising misuse. Then you use it ironically in your professional presentations to show that you are above the hoi polloi, both of today and of 15 years ago.

dthakur 11y ago

It's a font.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

DonHopkins 11y ago

We shipped a game called The Sims that used Comic Sans all throughout, that sold pretty well in spite of the font. In case you can't stand to read Comic Sans with your eyes, I also made an external screen scraping utility called Simplifier that reads Comic Sans text off the screen, and catalogs and recites the product descriptions with a speech synthesizer. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imu1v3GecB8&feature=youtu.be&t=3m15s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imu1v3GecB8&feature=youtu.be...

silliconeheart 11y ago

I love comic sans, I find it very readable.

Spooky23 11y ago

I get it, Comic Sans is tacky. But so is the fetishizing of Helvetica.

DonHopkins 11y ago
At least Helvetica has a whole movie about it! [1] "It's hard to evaluate it. It's like being asked what you think about off-white paint. It's just there. It's hard to get your head around something that's that big." "And most people who use Helvetica use it because it's ubiquitious. It's like going to McDonalds instead of thinking about food. Because it's there. It's on every street corner. So let's eat crap, because it's on the corner." [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JkpYgjbYRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JkpYgjbYRg
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  I knew Design[tm] had won the world when a generic fast food joint near me had words like "Burger" and "Chicken" styled in classic designer fonts and sandblasted into frosted glass on its windows. Definitely no Comic Sans.
  - DonHopkins 11y ago
    And there's the dystopian generic food of Repo Man [1]. [1] http://i.imgur.com/w6ODNaQ.png http://i.imgur.com/w6ODNaQ.png
    - bitwize 11y ago
      The most entertaining bit about the movie The Host (based on the Stephenie Meyer novel) was the fact that in a world ruled by Souls -- alien beings who possess humans and are incapable of dishonesty -- you go to a store marked "store". You pick up a bag of potato chips marked "potato chips", a jug of milk marked "milk" and a can of chicken soup marked "chicken soup". You walk out without paying for anything because the owners of "store" know you won't take more than you need and are providing for everybody. Oh yeah, all the labels are in Helvetica bold. Anything fanvier might be a way to get a dishonest advantage.

Absentinsomniac 11y ago

One of my CS professors had us writing papers, and we got extra points if it was in comic sans. I had to specifically install a ms fonts package for it. Ever since I've liked it, but don't actually use it. I think the whole thing surrounding comic sans is incredibly strange and I'm pretty sure I'm missing some context or something.

superswordfish 11y ago
It's the same as with Java, PHP, ketchup, strip malls, pop music, professional wrestling, etc. which are usually criticized with minimal mental effort. The opinion is used as a signal that you're not "one of them," that is, a commoner, though to a thinking person they establish you as exactly that, somebody who is incapable of nuanced thinking.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ldonley 11y ago
  This is too true. Best is when the opinions on these are formed with no previous experience with it. I have to use Perl at work and whenever someone finds out they say "I'm sorry that you have to use that terrible language!" Sure, I would prefer to use Python, but Perl has some useful features that other languages don't do as well which is why I use it. Conveniently, nobody who comments to me about Perl has ever actually used it. Same with when I have used Java in the past.

frik 11y ago

Comic Sams actually shipped with Internet Explorer 3-5 and Win98+. The font was meant for Comic Chat which came with IE3-5, an IRC chat application. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat You have to install IE on Win95 to get the font. IE4 included the Win95 shell upgrade which meant it turned Win95 to look like Win98. So a lot of people installed it.

coldtea 11y ago

The article is really the antithesis of a good critique. The comparison to Helvetica and Garamond misses the point of Comic Sans, which is to be a casual, friendly and playful (as opposed to professional, austere, serious, business-like) font that looks more handwritten than typographed (like the handwritten captions in pulp comics of yore). Even the kerning and height issues they point can be explained for that. Perfect kerning and proportions would ruin the illusion of it being handwritten and childlike. As to why all the hate, it's easy: middle class people with any "artistic" or "creative" inspirations (and I use the term loosely) will jump at the first chance to feel more sophisticated than the great unwashed masses. And designers are the very epitome of that crowd [1]. And most will just jump on any bandwagon related to such a cause (notice the hundreds of anti-Comic Sans blog posts, articles, even t-shirts), without thinking the issue thoroughly and trying to understand neither the original intent nor how and why people actually use the font in practice (which is even more important). The real question to ask is not why designers and hipsters "hate" it, but why the huge "unwanted masses" adopted it with such eagerness. But that would imply that the average designer also has something to learn from the people, instead of preaching his dictums (which most of the time are not tied to any science or real world observations at all) of "what should work" and what "they should like" to them. [1] The same people that, in their web incarnation, blathered on and on about "semantic markup", missing the point of both "semantic" -- a word that they repeated as parrots from one another after they learned it from a few misguided trend-setters -- and "markup", which is not supposed to be where you convey semantics). This, now mostly subdued trend, kept the web 5 to 10 years behind -- thank god for SPAs, flex and grid layouts and the like.

Avshalom 11y ago
To be fair the bandwagon started rolling for good-ish reason. For ages (probably still) Windows lacked any decent headline font, which meant a lot of shit got put into comic sans that shouldn't have. There used to be a blog full of funeral announcements and pink-slips printed in comic sans. You take a crap ____ (font in this case, but word/joke/phrase anything) and over use it and over use it in wildly inappropriate ways and it starts engendering hate real quick.
- 11y ago

jordigh 11y ago

Meanwhile, over in Lobsters, the OpenBSD devs claim responsibility for the recent wave of Comic Sans attacks: https://lobste.rs/s/0dxurz/new_hat_request_system/comments/phl1qg#c_phl1qg https://lobste.rs/s/0dxurz/new_hat_request_system/comments/p...

resoluteteeth 11y ago

In my opinion, the real reason Comic Sans is bad has nothing to do with the actual design of Comic Sans. The simple fact is that it gets annoying to read significant amounts of text if they are in fonts if they deviate too far from the normal standards. Fonts that try to emulate handwritten cursive, for example, are even more annoying. It's just that of the fonts that most people have pre-installed, Comic Sans may be unique in terms of being in the danger zone where it's almost normal enough that people try to use it for actual documents, but different enough that people forced to read those documents get irritated. This article is more along the lines of "Arial is bad," which may be true in terms of font design, but isn't the sort of thing normal people are going to go around wearing t-shirts about.

Cenk 11y ago

You know what I also hate? Popovers on websites asking for my email address. I get it, you read somewhere that you‘re supposed to build an email list to grow your audience. Just let me read in peace.

theandrewbailey 11y ago
I also hate Youtube embeds that won't fullscreen without watching the video on Youtube.
- dublinben 11y ago
  I assumed it was a YouTube embed, but it wouldn't load because I don't have flash. I guess I'll never get to see this guy's amazing presentation.

crb 11y ago

Designer Craig Rozynski has created a new version of Comic Sans, which fixes many (most?) of the typographical problems pointed out in this article: http://comicneue.com/ http://comicneue.com/ There's a good interview with Rozynski on the subject: http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2014/april/the-neue-comic-sans/ http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2014/april/the-neue-...

Avshalom 11y ago
Eh, the bold is alright but I think the regular version loses one of Comic Sans' most important qualities: it doesn't develop weird/anemic proportions when used at large sizes or in all caps. and personally I think the 'e' is too aggressive.

khaled 11y ago

I don’t hate Comic Sans and never understood all the hate, it a rather nice font actually.

tomelders 11y ago
It's my goto font when typesetting speech bubbles for my dank memes. Or when I want to give another designer an aneurism. People just need to chill out. The more people use Comic Sans, the better a pro-designers work looks against the "corporate-but-also-fun powerpoint" background radiation.

larrymcp 11y ago

Hmmm, I think the premise is way off-base here. People don't even hate Comic Sans... they hate how often it's used inappropriately. The article tries to construct this huge overwrought analysis of the font itself, but the font is fine. It's the tone-deaf way that people use Comic Sans that causes ridicule.

7Z7 11y ago
No, lots and lots of people really do hate Comic Sans, independent of use.

kristiandupont 11y ago

Is it just me or is Comic Sans such an easy target that it seems silly to be elitist about it? It's like if a bunch of film critics kept bringing up how bad Batman and Robin was.

CM30 11y ago
Well, the internet critics like to bring up how bad Batman and Robin was as a movie. There's a reason 'Bat Credit Card' became a meme back in the day. But yeah, it's an easy target.

LarryMade2 11y ago

Used it for years for a child care related newsletter - it is a nice readable informal font. Worked well for the audience.

JabavuAdams 11y ago

Because we're social creatures and we like to belittle out-groups to make ourselves feel special?

leonatan 11y ago

I couldn't continue reading this article after the third popup on mobile. Idiotic site design.

OJFord 11y ago

I've never before seen someone making the mistake of saying 'Legos' go so far as to capitalise it and append a registered trademark icon. LEGO is a trademark; 'LEGOS' is not.

jrcii 11y ago

This was the funniest thing to me, CERN released the Higgs boson finding in Comic Sans http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/4/3136652/cern-scientists-comic-sans-higgs-boson http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/4/3136652/cern-scientists-com...

brashrat 11y ago

sorry in advance for posting a contrary opinion, but this runs contrary to "both sides" of what I hear in the debate and I feel like it's worth sharing, I can't be the only one...: if you want to make a "warning" sign, like "Caution: electrical hazard", my claim is that it will get noticed MORE and serve as a better warning if you display it in Comic Sans. Reason, it looks like an actual person went to the trouble to warn you, as opposed to some overly cautious liability dodging corporate (or OSHA or insurance company) warning. And I'm not saying it's perfect or doesn't have a lot of other fails, but it's my goto font for signage because it's ubiquitous and it gets the message across. I'm mystified by people who only wish to be warned in ... in what, serif or sans, I don't even know?

polpo 11y ago

Comic Sans is a terrible font, even when used for its intended purpose. It has a really off-kilter awkwardness that doesn't evoke any sense of youth or playfulness. The perfect argument against Comic Sans is Chalkboard [1], a font created by Apple to have the same look but fixes everything wrong with it. Vincent Connare, the creator of Comic Sans, uses it as an example of how great Comic Sans is, saying "if Comic Sans is bad why make something similar." [2] But they made something similar because it was bad and needed fixing. Chalkboard shows that the concept of a casual handwriting/comic font is valid, it's just that Comic Sans blew the execution. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalkboard_(typeface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalkboard_(typeface) [2] http://www.connare.com/whycomic.htm http://www.connare.com/whycomic.htm

xufi 11y ago

I hated it since I knew it was wrong when I used it for an paper in 3rd grade

cafard 11y ago

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole