Design for Hackers: Why You Hate Comic Sans

Comic Sans’ message is obvious, it’s easy to pick out in the long list of fonts in Word and has a memorable name. It’s obviously and painfully friendly and playful.

How are normal people supposed to be able to tell that a font like Georgia is also much friendlier than the angular and rickety Times New Roman while at the same time being entirely appropriate for nearly every imaginable formal setting (unlike Comic Sans)?

Friendly fonts exists on everyones’ PC, it’s just that Word’s font picker doesn’t allow you to tell the difference at a glance unless it’s really obvious like in the case of Comic Sans.

Using fonts is hard, that’s why most people who are not used to doing it and have no experience with it pick extreme fonts with obvious differences.

But I agree, the hatred amongst designers is a bit strange, and there are obviously loads of people who want that style of font.

For example, my old phone was a Samsung Blackjack II running Windows Mobile. Ignoring the hassle of having to download the upgrade to WM as a zip file and read the instructions in some poorly written txt file, the installer on the actual phone used multicolored comic sans. It was displaying hex digits all over the place and pretty much providing me, the user with all kinds of information I didn't understand or need to know. I'm a technical person so I'm not as put off by this at most but the instant I saw 3 different colored bits of Comic Sans text, I worried about the trustworthiness of this upgrade system. It turned out to be right as it took me several hours to get working properly after nearly bricking my phone.

They select it because when you fire up Microsoft word, you generally have limited Font options ... and its the only font that looks remotely interesting compared to Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, Wingdings et al.

If you swapped out those starting fonts with other more interesting ones, Comic Sans use would plummet overnight.

As far as I can see, this article would like "programming for designers: why you hate Visual Basic For Applications".

Of course, me not being a developer, there's a chance that he-who-speaks-for-all-developers will step in and slap me down.

As for color schemes: any scheme which makes a website unreadable by the color blind will make it mostly unreadable by everyone else, too: human vision distinguishes shapes and details mainly via lightness contrast.

Served up small, Comic Sans doesn't have quite the same feel of awfulness.

Then add in that for all Helvetica's faults, it is amazingly versatile and readable. It is absolutely well designed for it's somewhat sterile purposes and therefore easy to paste up everywhere. Couple that with an air of Newness and, ironically, personalization of hiring your own print designer and next thing you know it's everywhere wnd beloved.

There's a lot more to the story, of course, but it all turns to the historical value of Helvetica being the font that a new wave of popular design championed. It was there when people wanted and needed it.

(It's also worth mentioning it's Swiss heritage and how often the relatively unique Swiss design aesthetic gets conflated with cries for simplicity, modernity, and "clean". All deserved, sure, but they certainly understate the contribution of valuing space and openness that seems to be the heart of that movement, to me. I've often heard that their design is inspired by the openness of the Swiss landscapes. Unique, beautiful, but hardly the Final Word in design aesthetics.)

The whole talk is good, but around 4:45 she starts talking about her cover design for books and music, and eventaully expands into covering buildings with words. The first thing she mentions is how much she hates Helvetica :-)

I concede, however, that Helvetica really is an excellently readable and anonymous font.

Now I'm imagining a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style, all in Comic Sans.

Aliasing and antialiasing is a big deal with web design as well. Oftentimes making your designs match the pixel grid will render them uniquely sharp allowing smaller details to be visible. If you miss the pixel grid you'll deal with antialiasing tech which will induce a subtle blur. Either effect may be desirable.

Finally, it's always worth refreshing the value of detail in design. The pixel level comparison of Garamond, Helvetica, and Comic Sans can be inspiration for the level of detail required to make a truly lively design.

I'll definitely be making a similar recommendation in my book. Thanks for reading.

> The annoying part is that it looks unprofessional, and out of place.

I submit that the reason behind sentence two are the technical details mentioned in sentence one.

In games, I occasionally use a font called Galette Medium, but it has a decidedly different feel.

Historically, in the days when a "font" meant "a set of metal blocks of uniform size with a glyph engraved on the end of each one", the "font size" was the height of each block of metal, which was an important thing to know when all the metal blocks used to set a page of type had to physically sit next to each other.

http://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/geek-of-the-week/larry-go...

If you're looking for comic book fonts, Blambot has some nice ones, used throughout the industry.