Comic Helvetic, an Unholy Combo of Comic Sans and Helvetica | Hacker News Reader

Comic Helvetic, an Unholy Combo of Comic Sans and Helvetica

kottke.org

79 pointsnightpool13 comments

Is it just me, or does this actually look pretty good! You still get the excellent proportions of helvetica with a more casual look. Helvetica on casual Fridays or something like that. It cures some of the worst sins of comic sans, like the slope on the "e"

This would be great for a research paper.

I also did like it as well.

I'm really loving these new variations on Comic Sans! Another one is Comic Neue [1], which I've enjoyed since I first encountered it.

[1] http://comicneue.com/

I must have a mono spaced version for my console and coding...

Comic Mono exists, and I use it

If this had a single-storey "a", this would genuinely be a fantastic font for my teacher friends. It looks good, it's slightly cleaner than normal comic sans, and it differentiates all the letters that need to be differentiated.

Is that so that the lowercase ‘a’ glyph in the typeface resembles their handwriting?

Exactly. For primary school children, it's really useful to have a printed font that looks like the letters they're actually going to be writing, otherwise you end up making things more complicated than it needs to be. Remember at this sort of age, children are reading letter-by-letter, and not whole words, so they need to be able to recognise the letters easily. The key features are:

* An "a" that looks like the "a" you actually write

* Differentiation between I/l/1

* Differentiation between 0 and O

* As few fancy flourishes as possible (i.e. sans serif)

This is really interesting. I remember as a child changing my handwriting so that i wrote "a" the same way that it appears on the computer. I still do it to this day, because it's much faster for me to write an "upside down e" in one stroke than the other way. I similarly write "d" with a single stroke too. I wonder if there are any fonts that replicate that kind of minimal stroke count handwriting?

Comic Neue has a single-storey 'a'.

(I made another comment about it on this post, I just wanted to highlight this detail here)

I thought we had all agreed to cancel April Fools Day.

Looks like Apple’s marker felt to me

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