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Comment by gyardley | Hacker News Reader

Oy. Comic Sans isn't problematic because everyone uses it, it's problematic because it's a bad font. The kerning alone is reason enough not to use it.

http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/why-you-hate-comic-sans/

By this author's logic we should all stop using Helvetica, too - it's way too common.

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Lobster and Comic Sans are both highly stylized font-faces, Helvetica is not. It's okay for Helvetica to be common because it doesn't scream "Hey look at me, I'm Helvetica!"

When non-stylized things become very common, it's usually because they're good all around choices: their popularity advances the field. When extremely stylized things become very common, it typically leads to embarrassment down the road.

In music for example, it's now very common to have the drums in the center of the mix. This is the default because it makes sense. You only notice the panning of the drums when it's something else. In the eighties it became extremely common to use almost nothing but synths, and to have the snare drum drenched in reverb. You listen back to eighties material now, and at best you appreciate the campiness of these things. Mostly they seem like a weird obsession that suddenly gripped the whole industry and warped everything to come out of it for a decade. The modern day equivalent of course is Autotune.

Grotesque sans were uncommon before the (say) 60s, and were very stylized for the time. You just don't notice that because we've been accustomed to them for so long, and because they are very effective for their purpose.

The parent comment is correct. Comic Sans isn't just stylized; it's a stylized face designed for a very particular purpose (as a stand-in for the hand lettering in comic books). And the problem with Comic Sans isn't that it's overused. It's that it's used in inappropriate places.

There is nothing wrong with making safe, popular choices in typefaces. Designers may gripe about how cliched Gotham is, but Gotham works. Comic Sans virtually never works. This post does not make a case that Lobster never works.

> Grotesque sans were uncommon before the (say) 60s, and were very stylized for the time.

Source?

Wikipedia sayeth about Helvetica:

"The aim of the new design was to create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, no intrinsic meaning in its form, and could be used on a wide variety of signage."

There's a history of sans-serifs (with emphasis on grotesques) here http://www.linotype.com/en/795/thesansseriftypefaces.html?PH... that seems to suggest they had caught on pretty well by the 20s.

Best I can do:

http://www.freddesign.co.uk/2010/04/archive/the-differences-...

... which suggests that Akzidenz didn't come into modern use until the '50s.

> It's okay for Helvetica to be common because it doesn't scream "Hey look at me, I'm Helvetica!"

But it does scream that at me.

I was shooting for the same thing. This guy does not seems to know anything about typography and his article is ridiculously small for such a big topic.

Comic Sans is grotesque and was badly designed from the start. One has to wonder why it was popular, i'm sure there is a ton of article about that (surely the author should have deepen a bit in the subject and check that),

But if I would have to guess, in the 2000 debut it was one of the widely available fonts that had a different (poor) look.

Lobster is NOTHING like comic sans, it's a good font unfortunately overused. That's it.

The vast majority of readers are not font snobs. They don't debate the merits of kerning or whitespace balance.

But they do notice when trendy fonts trend. And comic sans most certainly did trend, and it was that trend -- and not its relative font merit -- that made it so deridden. It is the Croc shoes of the font world. Wow that analogy works really well because while shoe snobs can rail off the problems with the mighty croc (ignoring its benefits), they completely miss the mark on why there is the general anti-croc backlash (hint -- hipsterism. Anti-populism. etc)

This article is dead-on.

Except I would refute that users are as aware of Lobster as the author might think.

Comic Sans shows up everywhere. Lecture slides, shop signs, product packaging... it (was|is)? ubiquitous.

Now, Lobster might twig in the minds of typography geeks and designers, but it isn't nearly prevalent enough to be in the concious of 99.999% of users. Let's face it, 99.999% users don't spend all their time on start-up websites.

Comic sans was never trendy, as such. Instead, its ubiquity was due to the fact that:

a) It was included in the default font set of just about every computer sold from nineteen-ninety-something to today, and

b) It was the only default font that was "fun" and "not boring" to the great unwashed masses of typographically unsophisticated people (a category in which I include even myself)

So everybody from teenagers to grandmothers would look through their font list and go "boring, boring, boring, ooh this one looks like handwriting, that's fun, I'll go with that". The other reason it's derided is therefore that it's used by design-naive people and hence associated with bad design; Comic Sans is very likely to be accompanied by flashing pink text and ugly clip art.

While writing this, I suddenly noticed that the expenses reimbursement form sitting on the desk in front of me is in Comic Sans. So add "HR reps" to the list.

Well, you probably really should not use Helvetica or Arial in your logo.

Part of the beauty of Helvetica is that people typically don't think about it. It's everywhere and it's a subtle typeface. That's why many brands use it in their wordmarks.

For example, see Helvetica and Neue Helvetica in the logos of BMW, 3M, Gap, American Apparel, Jeep, The NBA, Lufthansa, Target, Motorola, Verizon Wireless, McDonald's and Microsoft. There are many others I'm sure.

Now if you had said Papyrus, I would tend to agree with you.

But all of those logos were designed decades ago, and it was a perfectly reasonable typeface for logo design. The reason it has been used so often is, of course, that it is a very well designed font. But the whole point here is that its ubiquity makes it generally a poor choice for new logos. An aesthetic does not exist in a vacuum, and the cultural context of Helvetica is that it now looks generic.

It was only a matter of time before someone brought up Papyrus because Comic Sans hate is so over.

I agree that Lobster is a better font than comic sans, but both fonts have particular uses, and they both have a signature look that people recognize.

Helvetica, in my opinion, is a fantastic utility. It gets out of the way, and only those who know to look for it notice it.

The genius of Helvetica is that it's styled, but subtle. It "gets out of the way," but not entirely. The common assertion about Helvetica is that it's "clean" and unstylized. But actually, its cleanliness comes from the assertion of a certain style.

On a semi-related note, I highly recommend the documentary "Helvetica," as well as the books about the development of the font. I'm not a font wonk by any means, but I do enjoy design. Anyone with even a passing interest in the subject will get a kick out of the film.

Try Helvetica is a blog that alters photos of handmade signs from Brazil shops to use Helvetica. Some results are surprisingly good.

http://tryhelvetica.tumblr.com/

What's funny about this is the changes are not only the typeface. The creator is also correcting proximity, alignment, etc. I'd argue those factors make a much bigger difference in the quality of a design than typeface choice.

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