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I've always been quite irritated by the amount of disdain toward Comic Sans. Partly because I feel like this is such an easy target, and people who have just l
by Biganon 6y ago
I've always been quite irritated by the amount of disdain toward Comic Sans.
Partly because I feel like this is such an easy target, and people who have just learned 2 or 3 things about typography are very keen on bashing Comic Sans to show off their newly acquired knowledge.
Partly because, let's face it, it's not that bad. What it does, it does well, it's pretty legible, no glyph stands out from the general harmony, etc.
There's a reason it became massively used. It was included in windows because it was part of Microsoft Chat, which back then was heavily comic book styled, with speech bubbles for messages etc (something that has since then become a standard in IM). It appeared in the font drop-down list, and people picked it when they wanted their message to look a bit informal, not too severe. Of course, someone with design knowledge is able to achieve this without resorting to this specific font (or even a funny font), but most people lack this knowledge.
- foolfoolz 6y agoi made reading cards for my kids in comic sans because it’s one of the few fonts with the normal lower case a and g
- amake 6y agoThey’re clearly not “normal” if most fonts don’t have them (as default glyphs; many fonts have them as alternates).
- samcheng 6y agoBy "normal" he means the glyph we are taught to write by hand, which is also the glyph young children are taught to identify individual letters.
- userbinator 6y agoI personally write, and have seen many others use as well, the "two-storey" a and g, so I suspect there's regional variation.
- amake 6y agoYes, my point was that that is a very narrow view of “normal”.
- Dylan16807 6y agoThat's what context does, it narrows!
- other_herbert 6y agolook at “Annika” it’s designed to be legible for early readers Edit: not that comic sans is a bad choice I’ve just been working on things related to this and found that other font
- geofft 6y agoSearching for it - I think you're referring to "Andika"? https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Andika https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Andika https://software.sil.org/andika/ https://software.sil.org/andika/
- user2994cb 6y agoSassoon is designed for that purpose, this version seems OK: https://www.wfonts.com/font/sassoon https://www.wfonts.com/font/sassoon
- jasomill 6y agoYou're not wrong. As fan of single-storey (your "normal") "a" and "g", a few additional examples do, however, come immediately to mind: Classic example: Futura. Modern examples: Apple fonts: Monaco uses both single-storey "a" and "g"; San Francisco uses single-storey "g" by default, and includes single-storey "a" in stylistic sets. The Adobe Source (Code, Sans) and IBM Plex (Sans, Serif, Mono) font families include both single-storey "a" and "g" as alternate glyphs accessible through OpenType stylistic sets.
- michaelcampbell 6y agoI always felt somehow ashamed for liking the 'a' in Monaco.
- beloch 6y agoComic Sans is the Britney Spears of fonts. Overused/Overplayed. Legible/Catchy. Well crafted for its original purpose. Gets no respect. Probably deserves a little, but it makes you feel dirty to give it.
- Kaibeezy 6y agoNot sure it’s Britney. Comic Sans has no ambition; is chosen despite itself; is hyper-ordinary. It’s the supermarket’s-own-brand ramen noodles of typefaces.
- jehlakj 6y agoAnd I’m sure those ramen sell well. Fact is, not many people care. If you have a product that doesn’t target designers or the like, does it really matter?
- ljm 6y agoThis and the parent comment need to be written with Comic Sans to highlight how absurdly pretentious they are.
- mainstreemm 6y agoThis whole website and its entire commentariat are constantly participating in a neverending exercise of pretension one-upmanship and I implicate and debase myself by even pointing this out
- sterlind 6y agoI've heard that Comic Sans is accessible for dyslexics! But I don't have a source.
- knolax 6y agoI don't have any typographical basis to dislike Comic Sans. I just dislike it because it's ugly to the point of irritation for reasons I can't articulate. I suspect most people dislike it for reasons more similar to mine than because they have some principled basis for disliking it.
- jack2222 6y ago"if you like comic Sans, you know nothing about typography. If you hate comic Sans however, you definitely know nothing about typography"
- dheera 6y agoI just hate all handwritten fonts for passages of text because a single character looks the same every time it appears, which is very unrealistic and cringe-worthy for emulating handwriting.
- TuringTest 6y agoThere are handwritten-like fonts which avoid that problem, by having several versions of each glyph and choosing one randomly for each letter. Some of them even introduce some random variation in the shapes to replicate true handwritten text.
- dheera 6y agoI haven't heard of this but that sounds awesome. Are there a couple of good handwritten fonts you like that do this?
- africanboy 6y agoI am not a font designer, but I don't like Comic Sans for the same reason I don't like Las Vegas architecture that resembles ancient Rome or Egypt, even though I am not an architect. Maybe it's because they're both tacky?
- ballenf 6y agoVegas is just a big adult theme park. The giant pirate ship is not seaworthy.
- africanboy 6y agoThat's my point: comic sans is the Vegas of fonts. People who dislike it aren't trying to show off the "2 or 3 things that have learned on typography", they are simply not blind and can see its ugliness. But apparently people got offended when I've said that there's no need to be an architect to understand that Vegas has no architectural value... There's no special quality that makes comic sans good if you look close enough, it's just bad, 20 dollars WiFi router bad, LIDL shoes bad, IKEA lack table bad, Caesar Palace Forum shop bad, something that looks okeish from afar but that's not even good enough for casual use. Nobody would live and raise a family in a Treasure Island hotel room, nobody would seriously use comic sans to write code and look at it 8+ hours a day.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- michaelcampbell 6y ago> I've always been quite irritated by the amount of disdain toward Comic Sans. So who exactly is the more petty? People getting irritated by a typeface, or people getting irritated over those people?