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Comment by ianbooker | Hacker News Reader

I think I agree on the core idea, but if you extrapolate this into font selection, for example, you would rather pick Comic Sans for more "strategic" and abstract projects? ;)

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I've certainly used comic sans intentionally when presenting data. Much of this depends on audience too. A corporate board meeting is quite different from an activity with a group of rowdy 8-year-olds from a presentation in a university class from a tight-nit group of friends launching a startup.

Some comes down to power hierarchy too. Presenting up, I'm much more likely to try to appear professional. Presenting down, I go for approachable.

(Clearly you're joking) but this isn't an extrapolation. Lines that make up characters in a font don't have any semantic meaning related to the words. Lines in a graph do have semantic meaning related to the data they represent.

[edit] maybe you could make this argument for a language like Chinese. At least for characters with semantically meaningful radicals.

>Lines that make up characters in a font don't have any semantic meaning related to the words.

Err, actually they do. If not the line itself, the font's overall design does. A font can look casual, another official, fun, etc.

In fact this very post uses the "Humor Sans" font for the graphs for exactly this very reason. To make labels appear more casual.

Balsamiq is software that’s an example where picking deliberately poor fonts is a common thing to do in low-fidelity prototyping.

It helps because it focuses attention on higher level elements over nitpicking on details

https://balsamiq.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5cTZhKzm4AIVtx-tBh3O...

Not necessarily. For Comics Sans it is hard to know if it is an intentional or just sloppiness.

For xkcd plots, it is clear that someone put an extra effort in making it look sketchy.

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