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Comment by lomnakkus | Hacker News Reader

To provide at least one data point: My feelings about Comic Sans amount to "meh". I actually think it's a very-well designed font. It's just that people have no idea when it's appropriate and when it isn't.

I saw the light when I realized that Simon Peyton Jones (of Haskell/GHC fame) purposely used Comic Sans in all of his presentations -- just to weed out who was paying attention to the styling over the content. Generally, I think this might be a good principle, but you can definitely take it too far. For example, SPJ's slides are always well-articulated and don't contain L33tsp33k (or whatever we call what the kids use on IM these days).

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SPJ about Comic Sans:

> This is a very funny question, "Why use Comic Sans?" So, all my talks use Comic Sans and I frequently see remarks like 'Simon Peyton-Jones, great talk about Haskell but why did he use Comic Sans?' but nobody's ever been able to tell me what is wrong with it. It's a nice legible font, I like it. So until somebody explains to me ... Ah, I understand that it's meant to be a bit naff, but I don't care about naff stuff, I care about being able to read it. So if you have got a sort of ... some rational reasons why I should not then I'll listen to them. But just being unfashionable? I don't care.

Because it's difficult to read.

Are you saying that you think that Comic Sans is difficult to read?

(I'm prepared to believe you, but the main complaint I've ever heard is that it's "silly" or "frivolous" or... well, actually I haven't heard much beyond that.)

It draws too much attention to itself to be body text, yes. It requires the reader scan the letters more than recognizing the shapes of words and moving on. (Yes, this is why we miss misspellings and even missing words. It isn't my job as a reader to catch that. The author should have a spellcheck program and, if it's at all serious, a human proofreader.)

There's a reason there's a distinction between fonts for body text and title text: Body text is all pretty simple, uniform, and easy to just scan through. Title text is meant to be a logo in its own right, more difficult to read, and therefore take up more of your time. Comic Sans is, arguably, a reasonable title text font. It isn't for body text. It's meant to ape handwritten text in comic speech balloons, but if you look at actual good handwriting, it looks more like body text than title text.

> It draws too much attention to itself to be body text, yes

That's about the vaguest complaint I've ever heard. If you have statistics and studies then I'm definitely prepared to listen, but...

> it's difficult to read.

It's recommended for readers with dyslexia because the letter shapes vary so much. (I don't know if there's any research supporting that).

Which is exactly why it's distracting to fluent readers.

That's an interesting claim. Do you have any evidence/references to back that up?

(I mean, it makes intuitive sense, but that's not really a good indicator of... anything, really.)

I also find it difficult and unpleasant to read, particularly as body text.

> just to weed out who was paying attention to the styling over the content

I definitely understand the intention, but I think it's misguided. Does he also fart randomly during his talks to weed out who was paying attention to random noises over the content?

It's a rhetorical question, of course. I've been to several of his uniformly excellent talks, and no he doesn't, but I do think the talks are hindered by using Comic Sans not least beacuse it causes people to ask the question "why"!

Mostly the kids are using emojis in IMs these days. I can't really tell what they're trying to say, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for anyone.

It's probably mostly the unicode "pile of poo" character or something. I hear Deadpool was a huge hit.

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