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Comment by akent | Hacker News Reader

The lecture slides are in Comic Sans, ugh.

I used to feel like this, until I saw Simon Peyton Jones use Comic Sans for a slide deck on Haskell and decided this was a such a petty, knee-jerk reaction to something as superficial as font-choice. At this point, I'd almost choose Comic Sans on purpose for my own presentations, just to weed out and troll the people who aren't paying attention to what matters.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...

edited to add: Dug up an actual comment from SPJ on this, I hadn't realized he uses Comic Sans for all his talks:

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1bd1ia/spj_and_comi...

I've never understood the enormous enthusiasm people seem to to have for badmouthing Comic Sans. It's not particularly elegant, but it's quite readable and not particularly ugly. It more or less looks like hand-lettered dialogue in comics, and that seems quite accepted, and even respected.

I suppose type designers or whoever might be particularly sensitive to whatever transgressions it commits (I dunno), but almost everybody I've seen indulge in a bit of C.S.-bashing seems to otherwise not care very much about typography at all.

As far as I can figure, it's just because people love a bandwagon, especially one that's really easy to hop onto and entails few risks....

Give it a chance. The value of the content highly outweighs the presentation. I promise you that.

Among the widely available fonts, Comic Sans is apparently the easiest for dyslexics to read.

Maybe I have too much faith in other people, but my personal weighting of social proof is far higher than most aesthetic details in a document.

This is Hacker News, not Hipster News.

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