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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

He keeps saying it's an 'unattractive font', but the truth is, it became popular because so many people like it.

Here's the kicker: It's only 'unattractive' to people who know everything about typefaces. Nobody else cares, and they find it pleasing.

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I don’t think people really like it, they pick it because their choices are overwhelming, confusing and subtle.

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.

Nope, my mom uses it for her coursework as she's working toward her master's degree. She really does like it, she says it's more readable. We've all tried to convince her otherwise, but as long as her advisor doesn't mind, she'll keep using it.

I have no doubt that some people truly like it. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m wrong.

You need to show your mother Comic Sans Criminal: http://www.comicsanscriminal.com/

The best part is that it's not just a rant, there are some free alternatives that meets her "more readable" criteria.

Is there a website/app/service that will ask you what features you want of a font and it will show you recommendations?

I haven't seen one, but it could be a fairly nice weekend project. Use a couple of hacks[1] to get the fonts, compare that with a list of font uses, and ask the user:

What's the emotion to be conveyed? Where's it used? (Heading, wherever)

Then, display the top font, and a visual list of choices. I suppose that one could also link to free OSS fonts as well, but that would likely have to be second-tier compared to using what's on the computer already.

1. http://www.lalit.org/lab/javascript-css-font-detect

I would love to do this as a weekend project, although I don't have the first clue as to what fonts should be recommended based on what uses are intended. Anyone interested in collaborating? I'll do the backend and you develop the questions and font recommendations.

PM'd you. I do front-end as well.

Well, there's an awesome flowchart:

"So You Need a Typeface": http://julianhansen.com/index.php?/alternative-type-finder/

The path to Comic Sans is appropriately humorous.

Damn, that flowchart is pretty much the posterchild of how not to make a flowchart. Unnecessarily overlapping elements everywhere. It's damn near impossible to follow and I'm supposed to trust their design knowledge?

It's also just unhelpful. It's not even clear what many of the questions are getting at. Furthermore, look how many of the branches have a leaf on one side and a huge subtree on the other. Unless he expects the leaves are going to be chosen that much more than the big subtrees, he's nowhere close to getting as much information out of each question as he can.

http://typekit.com/libraries/full?languages=english&styl...

something like that?

Identifont is a "20 Questions" quiz to identify a given font, but I've used it to discover fonts for a given purpose.

http://www.identifont.com/identify.html

Is this parody or your real view?

Why should it be a parody? What’s wrong with the argument?

> 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)?

True story:

I call a designer friend of mine, and start to ask him, "I'm making a new website, and I was wondering what font would---"

He interrupts -- "Georgia."

Me: "I didn't tell you anything about the site yet."

Him: "Doesn't matter. Choose Georgia. You win."

I did. Later, a different designer friend of mine was emailing me, and writes in the PS, "By the way, I'm always thinking about beautiful the font on your site is, and then I realize it's Georgia. Ahhh, Georgia."

I laughed. Georgia for the win.

"By the way, I'm always thinking about beautiful the font on your site is, and then I realize it's Georgia. Ahhh, Georgia."

Thinking about that old sweet font the whole day through?

The reason many designers choose Georgia is that is has character. But I would say it really depends on what you are doing. If you are trying to make something look futuristic or techy you probably shouldn't be doing Georgia but rather. Trebuchet, Arial or Tahoma. Also Georgia does not render equally nice in all browsers.

So although I would tend to agree with them I would caution the Georgia for everything approach.

> 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

You're echoing my thoughts nearly exactly.

Georgia is unparalleled as a Serif web font. One interesting thought about Times New Roman is that - since it was designed for the London Times - it was originally designed to use less paper. Why should we suffer the consequences when space is no longer a consideration?

I was just looking at this last night and came upon a source for the whole "I hate Comic Sans" meme.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11582548

Interesting, the folks credited with getting it started[1] were really concerned about its inappropriate use, not that it was otherwise objectionable.

[1]Holly and David Combs, who started the website bancomicsans.com

I think its more that people wanted a casual, playful font. And comic sans was the only option. Given a simlar, but better designed font, I think most people would choose it. Comic sans is strangely hard to read when you compare it to an actual comic book, for example.

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

There are some subtle effects with Comic Sans that don't get considered, even by big companies.

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.

I don't know anything about typefaces, but I still think it's unattractive.

I think that part of Comic Sans appeal to those who use it the fact that it offends "elitist" graphics designers. It is the Sarah Palin of fonts.

Most people don't have any idea what offends graphics designers of any sort.

Helvetica is unfairly celebrated, boring, overused and the choice of skill-less designers worldwide.

No ... people don't find it pleasing.

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.

I don't think it's necessarily hated by all designers either. As I understand it, a good designer has many arrows in their quiver and uses them accordingly. In my very limited design research, I got the impression that Comic Sans could give an informal look that Helvetica would be hard-pressed to duplicate.

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.

I speak for all developers, VBA is an abomination.

At least, I speak for all developers that have used it.

I have to agree with that. And it some cases it helps unify and communicate the purpose of the app. I'm not using Comic Sans but rather 'Permanent Marker' on http://hipstaroid.com. It's a site for taking your Facebook pictures, and adding tags to them like you could do with old school polaroids.

Also, Comic Sans is an easy choice because it's the third font listed on Windows.

Not sure they like it, I think they just don't mnid and its the only "less formal" option there is on a typical user's font list.

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