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Comment by blue1 | Hacker News Reader

Please no. Doh’t feed bad typography to kids.

(When I was a kid, I had access to good design examples. I hated fonts “for kids”. Also, because the essence of play is simulation, and childish fonts ruin the game)

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Comic sans black on white is more readable than most copy produced in modern web products.

Designers love grey on grey. I’ll take comic sans any day.

Font and font contrast are entirely orthogonal.

Are they? Font contrast is a multifaceted concept that encompasses not only color but other properties as well. For instance, stroke weight and its modulation, which are inherent to a typeface.

Can you give a visual example where they're not? (other than anti-aliasing round the edges)

See https://medium.com/alex-couch-s-portfolio/type-hierarchy-and... for some of them. The “blurry eye test” mentioned there is related to the typographical term of color (see https://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bigelow-holmes/2015/04/... and https://practicaltypography.com/color.html) which is affected, among other things, by the actual shape of the glyphs. Font contrast has little to do, if anything at all, with anti-aliasing.

I see. You're clearly knowledgeable in this area and my naively used terminology has misled you. In terms of contrast I'm talking about the simple stuff "Contrast is the difference in luminance..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_(vision) whereas you're talking of something typographical I was unaware of. Sorry for the confusion.

In the end, font contrast also involves the simple stuff, but the difference in perceived luminance depends on more than just foreground and background colors.

To be fair, though, the first comment that referred to contrast was clearly talking only about color, and had nothing to do with "topography contrast."

The original comment was

> Designers love grey on grey. I’ll take comic sans any day.

These are two orthogonal features. It's like saying "fashion today is really into high waists, but I'll take denim any day."

> the first comment (…) was clearly talking only about color

That comment explicitly mentions a typeface (Comic Sans).

They’re not. The people asking for specific font faces for brand or accessibility reasons are the same people who design apps and websites with text I can’t read.

In this case, click the post link. It’s black text on a white background. Comic sans would work fine, and it would be better than a monospaced font added for some nostalgia for a time when fonts could not be kerned.

They're orthogonal in the space of pixels on the page, and maybe not even, if the font includes some gradients or dithering, but they fit into different wholes, with some dependence.

Denim has a design style to it that goes beyond the material, as does comic sans. Like, you could put "comic sans" as part of a dalle prompt, and it would do more than pick a font

While I wouldn’t advocate for Comic Sans, monospace isn’t exactly good typography either.

But appropriate for a game about shell commands.

> When I was a kid, ... I hated fonts “for kids”

So you were a snob since you were a child. Got it.

Please stop gatekeeping subjective matters.

Kids don't like comics fonts?

Not when they'ee out of place.

Any time I've worked with kids older than ~8, they'll gravitate away from comic or obviously "kid focused" fonts, and more towards "cool" fonts.

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