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I agree with the sentiment of the parent post.

Regarding why Comic Sans is so popular

Try a simple exercise if you are on Windows:

1) Imagine you are writing something that is purposefully not professional or serious looking.

2) Open your text editor and paste/type one headline and some text

3) Format with a font that does not look serious or professional

See the problem? There is simply no alternative to Comic Sans, that's why it's the first choice whenever someone is looking for a font other than the classics, in fact Comic Sans is already a classic...

I love these free comic fonts.

http://www.blambot.com/

Yeah blambot saved me from comic sans a lot back when I need to make club-fliers on a regular basis.

You're right, Comic Sans hatred is partially motivated by a designer's desire to advertise their refined taste. And Comic Sans, reeking of diapers and toddler saliva, is also offensive to a freshly urban-outfitted adult.

But the masses also use Times Roman and Helvetica, a lot, which are okay choices, and you don't see hipster movements against them. The above critique is totally solid on the reasons why Comic Sans does have real flaws, even given its design goals.

When desktop publishing met a mass audience, none of the other fonts met these users' needs. Comic Sans has open counters, which is good for legibility. And many home users want signage or communication with a more informal feel.

To their credit, Microsoft figured out that their users needed these things and polished up something that they were already working on. It wasn't a perfect job, but I'm not sure what other options they had used at the time. At the time, I think Adobe and MS were still in a format war, and few fonts could meet Microsoft's demanding requirements for on-screen legibility with low-end computers.

Comic Sans was perfect for Microsoft Comic Chat [1], described in David Kurlander's SIGGRAPH paper [2] and published by Microsoft for Internet Explorer in 1996. It was used to publish a synchronized streaming audio, text and comic strip version of NPR’s CarTalk show [3], and in 1998 to produce a web comic named Jerk City [4]. Jim Woodring drew some of the Comic Chat characters and background artwork! [5]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

[2] http://kurlander.net/DJ/Pubs/SIGGRAPH96.pdf

[3] http://kurlander.net/DJ/Videos/CarTalkComicChatVideo.shtml

[4] https://www.jerkcity.com/

[5] http://alchetron.com/Jim-Woodring-913512-W

The masses are more likely to use Arial than Helvetica, and that gets almost as much stick as Comic Sans.

Of course the more advanced hipster can be snooty about Helvetica too if need be:

http://www.fontbureau.com/nhg/

> 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.

Added to this, it is often the only font on a computer that has an 'open 4' which is why a grade 2 teacher I know uses and prefers it for worksheets, since it's much easier for kids to replicate and distinguish an open 4 from a hand-printed 9.

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.

I think designers tend to overestimate how much the average end user cares about their font choice. If you can avoid using that old English font or any of the ones that look like cursive handwriting, you're doing well enough for 99% of the audience. The world would get along just fine if all we had were Times New Roman, Consolas, Comic Sans, and maybe a "serious" sans serif one.

Design has a longer history than computers, so it's dangerous to approach things from a pure computer perspective as you have here. It's tempting to think that design is just superfluous puffery, but that is not the case. Design is about improving communication and usability, it differs from art in that it requires some concrete purpose (even if that purpose is aesthetic).

If, as you suggest, we only had four typefaces, yes, we would get along fine. However pretty soon a bored person would create a new typeface, and that new typeface would grab everyone's attention and thus be a huge competitive advantage. So you see, a four-typeface world is just not a stable state.

Another very important thing to recognize about design is that the "user caring about font choice" has absolutely nothing to do with design. Design does its job unconsciously. Of course anyone is free to critique anything, whether or not they know anything about design, they are still free to state their thoughts and preferences. But the designer's goal is not for any sizable chunk of their audience to recognize and applaud their font choice; that's just not what design is about.

Comic sans is a bit less readable but not that much for short passages. It's certainly not enough to justify hatred.

Design is a way of demonstrating social class. Its rules don't have to make sense as long as they're useful for showing that you're a member of the class that cares about design and thinks that certain designs are good. They also don't need to be consciously understood. Font choice demonstrates social class whether or not the audience understands how it works. It's one of the reasons why it's important in business to hire a good designer.

So while certain font choices may be more legible and designers may use legibility to rationalize them, that's less important than demonstrating that you're one of those people who gets design. This causes subtle differences to be magnified since it's about showing allegiance.

So when someone chooses comic sans they may be ignorant, but what are they ignorant about? A well-known social rule. They may also be using it either deliberately or unconsciously as a way of demonstrating they're not a member of the social classes that "get" good design.

So, personally, I've learned to be more forgiving of "bad" design, and also "bad" spelling and grammar, even though I try to get it right myself. I don't want to be that judgmental about social class.

Very interesting perspective you bring, I can't say I disagree with anything you've said. From my perspective, most things people hate don't justify hatred because honestly the emotion of hatred is meant to be deployed in more high stakes scenarios, a good deal of which have been removed from our modern sanitized society (especially—to your point—for the middle to upper classes). People get angry about all kinds of ridiculous nonsense.

That said, I don't think design is primarily a social construct. There is actual meat to design. Design can communicate social constructs, but it's not some kind of insider's club for the upper class. There's a basic barrier to entry, but it's no more exclusive than any other form of higher education, which these days is lower than ever.

"For ages (probably still) Windows lacked any decent headline font"

There are lots of decent fonts on Windows suitable for headlines. In fact, a decade ago (2005), Microsoft released their clear type font collection: six fonts designed by well-known type designers (the fonts are Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel)

So the choice is certainly there, but Comic Sans is popular among non-designers because of it's informal, friendly handwriting appearance.

I think the original article is unfair to compare Comic Sans, an informal script font, to a formal Serif and Sans Serif font. It would be better to choose another informal script font for comparison and to explain why one is better than the other.

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.

This statement is itself a sweeping, unsupported generalization, a stereotype-based bit of elitist snobbery in exactly the fashion that it itself describes. Perfectly self-reflexive. Could it possibly be an accident?

> 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.

Blaming the overwrought hatred of Comic Sans entirely on the sneering bourgeoisie is just as silly as blaming it on the great unwashed masses. (Which this article did not do.)

I don't see anyone else complaining about it.

You've checked up on every person who doesn't like Comic Sans, and found that every one of them is middle-class with smug artistic pretensions?

It seems more likely that you've circularly defined "sneering bourgeois" as "doesn't like Comic Sans" and vice versa.

You must have worked with some pretty bad designers in the past to have that much contempt for them.

I don't have "contempt". I just try to understand their behavior, like I do for other fields, including my own (which might also exhibit similar behavior in other issues).

And what I see is often a contempt for the designer-ignorant layman.

All the usual caveats apply: what I say is not applicable to absolutely, no exceptions, 100% of designers, but mostly to the particular subculture/demographic we talk about here: Western/US designers from the young/urban/hipster population (which makes for the majority of those of them posting their opinions on design issues on the web).

Or just read one too many articles like this one .

Or just read one too many articles like this one.