In Defense of Comic Sans

> It seems like a sane defense of Comic Sans is that it's great for lettering comics

A comic typed in Comic Sans has the same problems of a novel in Comic Sans or an advertisement in Comic Sans. Unless it is done on purpose in some sarcastic way, it's perceived as a sign of low quality and bad design.

Actually, most professional comics use custom fonts, and choosing the type face is a relatively common topic of discussion between comic authors and editors.

The criticism on Comic Sans consists of two factions:

- Designers who often critizise weird usage of the font (e.g. it is great for a birthday party invitation and bad for a stern warning inholving serious danger)

- people who misread that criticism, hop onto a bandwaggon of their own making and say the font is bad as a whole, because it is not “serious”

Anybody knoes that papyrus font? This had a similar story, with sometimes absurd usages.

> it seems more like a kid made this

Your daughter is very right. That's why it is not the most appropriate font for a legal letter from an attorney, for example.

"comic sans is bad" may be an overused meme, but not as bad as comic sans itself.

Are you talking about lobste.rs or are you talking about this font? https://www.dafont.com/lobster.font

Where is it used?

I've never hated Comic Sans, and still don't. But there's no question in my mind that it was overused, and -- worse -- often used inappropriately.

In-between, after Apple bundled Zapfino making it accessible, and before Google Fonts made Lobster accessible, it was Zapfino that was abused everywhere.

I have always hated Times New Roman. I am alone in the world.

We could always tell in my courses when a lecturer was a Physician Researcher depending on whether or not their slides had a Yellow/White/Red text on a blue-to-dark-blue gradient background.

It was eerie how common it was, despite the clinicians coming from different hospitals/universities/backgrounds.

Yes, Comic Sans is irreverent. That's both its appeal and its curse. It's very easy to be overexposed to it.

Not that I’m calling myself super smart, because spending so much time commenting on forums about things I don’t know that much about probably means I’m not, but Comic Sans is my goto font for pretty much all my presentations. Comic sans and well placed gifs.

It’s part of the charm for me, and I use it as a self-confidence boost and a reminder that life doesn’t have to be so serious, because now I can inject some humour into a talk and I have to own that well enough to keep a straight face while delivering the material. Especially in your typical office set up, it’s quite cathartic, and I genuinely enjoy showing people that you don’t have to be so perfect.

I have a lot of respect for people who can bring a bit of lightness to what can otherwise be quite dull day. We are all human after all.

As an example, I think Gary Bernhardt is great with this. The Wat talk is a classic.

> I like Comic Sans when I see super smart people, like physicists as an example, use it in presentations.

I still remember that very interesting presentation by Fabiola Gianotti when they presented the results that proved the existence of the Higgs Boson. In Comic Sans.

I have dyslexia, and I can attest that I find it easier/quicker to read than some other fonts.

This gets repeated over and over, but if you look at the literature, empirical studies are split between _may_ slightly help to no observable difference. Where things get interesting are studies that take into account letter spacing, they show that Comic Sans spacing may somewhat help. Still, if you apply the same spacing to a regular font, accuracy increases about the same. The accuracy increase is so minimal that it probably presents no practical advantage AFAICT.