What is wrong with Comic Sans?
graphicdesign.stackexchange.com
graphicdesign.stackexchange.com
Comic Sans is an informal-looking font, which means low status. Seeing a high-status researcher using it in front of a relatively high-status audience speaking about a serious, high-status topic… is jarring for many people. On a similar note, I know of a guy who often illustrates his very serious philosophical points with Japanese anime references.
Many people don't like such status dissonance. They literally cringe. I don't, and I suspect Simon P.J. doesn't either. And I don't see why we should: we're the kind of people who care more about the structure of an argument than the clothes the speaker is wearing. This is also apparent in His talk, "How to Write a Great Research Paper"[1, 2]. His counsel is all about readability and engagement, never about sounding serious or important.
[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3dkRsTqdDA
[2]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...
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As a last note, I have seen suggested here, and in the Stack Overflow thread, that there are much better fonts out there (Comic Neue seems to be the most popular alternative). But let's imagine for a second that SPJ used Comic Neue instead of Comic Sans. Would that make people stop asking why he's using this font?
I don't think so.
If you come to apply to a job, and your resume is Comic Sans, you're wearing torn-up clothes, you haven't had a bath in a while, and your English is sub-par? I'm going to make some inferences about your ability to do the job based on the status signalling you're giving me.
But in this case, the person providing the information is, obviously, the one offering the favor. He is, in fact, providing information that the consumer wants to consume. So it's his complete decision how to do that. After all, he's not asking a favor of the audience, and if they want to discount the information based on a font choice? That says a lot more about them than it does about him.
Reminds me of "eye dialect", where an author chooses to purposefully mis-spell words in order to show dialect and have a more emotional impact on the speaker. Many readers hate that stuff. Sometimes I find it really annoying. But heck, that's art. Man wants to spend an hour telling you about something important, you either get past the font choice or go somewhere else.
Weird thing, font snobs. It's like they don't have anything better to complain about, so they just search around for whatever they can find.
This isn't a bad thing -- the pre-association people have for different classes of fonts make it easier to convey messages in branding and marketing. It makes us distinguish between stories in newspapers and magazines (which we should remember) from frivolity that we could easily forget. With fonts, the medium is a significant part of the message.
But if the font is used by default, you cannot reasonably infer credibility from it. If the whole thing feels less credible or less serious anyway, then it's a status issue.
And now I'll Godwin myself out.
Fun fonts can be serif or sans, and are generally more artistic and ad oriented.
But on paper, with much higher resolution, serif looks more serious.
There is general negativity towards the idea of making assumptions based on appearances; but if we collectively decide that appearance is meaningless, don't we lose the useful ability to send intentional messages using appearances?
ie in this instance, if we stop associating comic sans with silliness, will we then have to <silly>decorate our sentences with XML tags</silly>?
(See also: people who dress in goth clothing then complain when strangers assume they are into goth culture)
It might be related to status, but in that case it's complicated; the low status people are looking for ways to appear high status (avoid comic sans), or ways to make others appear low status (eww, look, he used comic sans), whereas the high status people want to protect the integrity of status; a low status person using comic sans is likely viewed a bit patronizing ('well he's a dev; they don't know any better'), and another high status person would be more likely to be defended for the choice, if not have it outright ignored ('the content is what's important; he was just having a bit of fun').
When I see Comic Sans, the tone I read the text in is "cartoon dog." Although this particular interpretation may be just me, I believe many people have similarly toned readings (it comes down to cultural interpretation of symbols...). So, it is jarring and inappropriate for many people to see Comic Sans, in certain contexts.
There are many equally legible fonts out there which do not signal "cartoon dog" or similar. So, yes, you can can present your research in the voice of a cartoon dog. But, it is pretty tone deaf.
It is essentially kitsch, in font form, and because of that it's going to devalue the information it presents in many contexts, and is thus only likely to go unregarded in contexts where kitsch is basically expected.
I recently received a letter from the Finnish employment department demanding more documentation of an alleged business interest. This is a government official making a request that potentially threatens my livelihood.
In Comic Sans.
As an emotive impact, it was very much like your "cartoon dog". Imagine getting a Garfield condolence card as a layoff notice, or seeing a :) smilie at the end of a foreclosure notice. It seems to immediately impart a lack of respect for the gravity of the situation.
So again, what's wrong with that font? Nothing, intrinsically. Its all in the 'internet meme' part that says its passé. Quit subscribing to that (or like me, never emotionally invest in any silly meme) and the issue disappears.
While you might not be able to recognize the exact font used, (What's the difference between Arial and Calibri?) you can still look at the general category of font. Times New Roman and other serifed fonts have a connotation of formal writing - the New York Times is written in a serifed font. Courier New, for me, has a connotation of formal military orders (Don't ask me why they write it in that font. I assume it's to be consistent with the 1920s) Even if you can't name the exact font, you still get connotations associated with it. For many programmers, seeing Courier New in a block of text implies code. I'm sure that the reason for doing it originally was probably arbitrary, but it's the established manner of doing things, just like wearing a strip of silk or nylon around your neck is considered more formal than just the collared shirt.
Comic Sans is a font that is used to convey informality. It's something that you would use, as one of the Stack Exchange answers cites, as a daycare sign or a pamphlet targeted at children. It's a tool for the job that it's designed for. And while you can use any text to present information, (Any tool becomes a hammer if you try hard enough) it's not the proper tool for presenting formal findings or writing a newspaper. And that's okay - there are plenty of other fonts with the desired level of formality.
Of course, you're probably aware of all this, and your response is probably "Well, the rules are pretty stupid. People are taking academic presentations and scientific results less seriously because the font is funny." There's something to this argument, but the fact is that we all make judgments based on past experience, and adherence to social rules is one of the things we judge. If established rules state that you dress nicely to an interview, we negatively judge someone who shows up in a ripped T-shirt and jeans. We might be wrong about such a candidate - he might be the greatest worker alive - but more than likely, his cluelessness (or hostility) regarding the social rules of an interview says something negative about him.
That's not an argument against their value, that's merely a refusal to acknowledge it.
Clearly its understood that aesthetics are based on associations. I'm here to assert: a significant fraction of the population (non-designers?) have no associations one way or the other.
I don't believe that's the main problem at all. The problem is aesthetic[1]. Some letterforms are inherently unbalanced and create tension, notably the wild angles in the m, the serif in the s, and the tipping-over T. The wobbles in the I, n, and h distract as well. Beyond that, there are the subtler issues of different inclination on the verticals (j, t, l, h) and bad kerning for various character pairs.
If Comic Sans were truly convincing as handwritten font, it would probably be better; on the plus side it is sufficiently far from that that it avoids falling in the very bottom of a handwriting uncanny valley.
Now aesthetics doesn't necessarily impede legibility per se, but beauty and visual harmony are generally enjoyable, and use of Comic Sans eschews it. Compare it to the much better Comic Neue[2].
[1] example: http://kinkeaddesigns.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Comic-S...
That is, perhaps, a good indication of the disconnect between how professionals trained in graphic design perceive something and how the vast majority of the public perceive it. Most people wish their handwriting looked as neat and legible as Comic Sans. It doesn't look like it was written by a twelve year old, it looks like unprofessional. Which is why people like it.
Many people, when they see something they wrote in a standard computer font, think that it looks wrong. It doesn't look like their words any more, it looks too cold, formal, impersonal, professional, machine-like. They don't want their words to look like something that has been reviewed by a series of editors, run by the legal department and then sent to the team of graphics artists for final layout.
Comic Sans looks warm, friendly, human, and informal.
Everything you list as aesthetic defects are exactly the characteristics that make Comic Sans successful.
[1] http://kinkeaddesigns.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Comic-S...
Many nice humanist sans-serif faces communicate "friendly, human, informal" well in practically any setting, but okay, there are folks who absolutely must have something that indicates "handwriting" in order to be sufficiently informal. Several typefaces fit that bill--Comic Neue, Architect's Daughter, maybe Just Another Hand--but seem nicer to read (not quite the same as legibility).
So what if we don't care about those issues and we don't feel the tension?
A valid question that I can't answer well briefly.
It takes some training or practice to recognize many forms of beauty, such as that in paintings, film, or buildings. The more educated/practiced one is in such things, it seems, the more one is able to pick out beauty and its lack. This consciousness makes ugly things more painful, but this is probably outweighed by the increased pleasure of beautiful things. (The idea of training improving one's perceptions isn't in tension with some person-to-person & culture-to-culture variance in what's beautiful.)
Even without practice, certain kinds of beauty or visual tension (which btw is not always ugly, though usually is when not "resolved") probably affect you even if you're not aware of it. Such effects have been observed in the other media I mentioned, though I'm not sure if typefaces have been so studied. So even if you don't feel the tension, it may be there, and it would only rise to consciously perceived levels with long exposure. Obviously there's some theory and speculation involved, but many fundamental design principles do by & large work.
Finally, let's say you conclude that it's a waste of time to enhance your critical eye for typefaces, you don't believe there is unconscious tension, etc. This is reasonable! But even then, you could still—nearly effortlessly—pick typefaces that work for you and work for us when you're communicating with a broad audience.
Sure, but do you recognize a beauty that's actually there, or you merely recognize what you were taught to recognize? (e.g you respond with a Pavlovian reflex to things you were conditioned to see as beauty).
Beauty isn't "there" in the object to in the same way mass or volume is there; it's contingent on human perception. Beautiful things trigger similar effects in a huge variety of people, perhaps universally (though being attentive to conscious of those feelings doesn't come automatically). So it seems meaningful to discuss what's beautiful and what's not, though skepticism about any single individual's or culture's standards of beauty is warranted.
Why just pretend?
> Is beauty and visual harmony always a desired property?
No. But bad technical execution is usually an undesired property, no matter what tone I want to set with a certain typeface.
Do you mean to say that there is any substantial evidence to the contrary? If so, you should elaborate.
> No. But bad technical execution is usually an undesired property, no matter what tone I want to set with a certain typeface.
OK. Please let me know what exact technique is being executed badly and how. Just dropping "bad technical execution" out of nowhere without substantiating or explaining the claim in any way isn't a valid argument.
> John Tukey almost always dressed very casually. He would go into an important office and it would take a long time before the other fellow realized that this is a first-class man and he had better listen. For a long time John has had to overcome this kind of hostility. It's wasted effort! I didn't say you should conform; I said ``The appearance of conforming gets you a long way.'' If you chose to assert your ego in any number of ways, ``I am going to do it my way,'' you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble.
As for the wider debate, people have pointed out that it's a matter of form vs. function, but there's another aspect, which is intention. If you do not intend to convey any extra information by using Comic Sans, then discussing the font choice is irrelevant. It's only when Comic Sans is used to signify something that the whole form vs. function argument comes into play.
I, for one, am glad that there is a popular font that pisses experts off, Comic Sans is the punk rock of the font world, I hope others will make an impact.
They complain about comic sans to show membership to a group. Like cracking a Star Trek joke.
To fit into the 'I am a designer that cannot use anything other than Photoshop club' you have to mock comic sans in all of its uses and show utter disgust at what is a truly popular font. It is as easy to do as mocking the talent show boy bands. On the 'designer' learning curve it is up there with replacing all text with lorem ipsum.
Despite what people say in general Comic Sans is used quite appropriately, particularly by those that are not designers. If you want people to go to the village fete then a 'designed' flyer is not what you want, something banged out in Word with Comic Sans actually conveys the message pretty well.
Hahaha. When I knew Simon Peyton Jones he didn't wear shoes at all—just bare feet—in Glasgow—one of the coldest, wettest cities in the UK.
It's the exact same situation as programmers have with goto - there's this widely established meme of "goto considered harmful" that most have heard somewhere, but have no clue why it's so except that it is. Only few of us know why using goto leads to bad consequences (and what those consequences are); even fewer could name situations where goto is a right tool for the job. For the rest, it's fashion.
Since the topic of the presentation is in the field of education, I think that Comic Sans (and other similar readable fonts - Comic Neue, Open Dyslexic) is a very appropriate choice. It shows that the presenter is cognizant of getting information across efficiently. And for all those detractors, I'd like to ask them, "Do you ever use Comic Sans (or similar fonts) in your classes? If not, why not?"
So it might make sense to use a font that goes pretty much unnoticed, to put the focus on the content of the talk. Then again, maybe he is thinking more along the lines of "if my font choice is the most important thing to you, feel free to leave/not watch this talk."
I feel like, if I were advocating something (FP, Haskell, new ways of teaching computer science, or whatever), I would want to do everything I could to keep the discussion on-topic.
Of all the little things that annoy me about Comic Sans, this is by far the worst.
Suppose I showed some of my Haskell code to a group of people and they all told me that every Haskell expert says I should keep my IO functions as minimal and separate as I can. I ask them why, and they assure me again that Simon Peyton-Jones himself is adamant about this, but none of them seem to be able to put an explanation into words.
I wouldn't just dismiss them with "it works fine for me" and not even bother to Google something like "haskell separate impure code". So why do so many people do that when the advice is coming from designers instead of engineers?
But in general I agree with you. "Until somebody explains to me... a rational reason..." - I will explain it: It is detracting (however unfortunate that may be) from your message/content.
In a way, this is a bit like the encounter of a Canadian and a Scottish officer on South Beveland (Netherlands) in October 1944.
> In the early hours of the 29th I was out with a unit of carriers, maintaining a standing patrol on the left flank of the battalion. In order to complete our patrol, we utilized some Dutch bicycles to patrol down a dyke to the bank of of the West Scheldt. All our men were desperately tired and in a filthy, wet, muddy condition. On our way we were terribly surprised to find a party of what were obviously Allied troops landing in a small boat. Then forth from one of the boat onto the shore stepped what seemed to me to be the finest soldier I had ever seen in my life, a fine figure of a Scottish gentleman, carrying the shepherd's crook affected by some senior Scottish officers in place of a cane or a swagger stick. He had a small pack neatly adjusted on his back. (I had absolutely no idea where mine was and couldn't care less.) His gas cape was neatly rolled. (I had last sen mine somewhere around Eterville.) He had his pistol in a neatly blancoed web holster. (I had mine in my hip pocket.) He had a neatly kept map case. (I had mine stuck in my breast pocket.) He was a Colonel and I was a Captain. His boots were neatly polished and I was wearing turned-down rubber boots. I did manage to salute, although I think it must have been haphazard. He politely enquired if we were Canadians. (Although who else could have looked as we did?) I assured his we were. He asked if I could direct him to battalion headquarters. I did better than that. I escorted him to battalion headquarters. I was taking no chances on losing such a beautiful specimen to the German Army. *
*: D. G. Godspeed, Battle Royal (Toronto 1962), 509. (cited in Terry Copp, The Brigade (Mechanicsburg, PA 2007), 160.)
I don't use it anymore as I can't be bothered to annoy people on purpose anymore, and nowadays there is not much effort needed to find a nice google font etc.
Although I do still like to argue about tabs-spaces, curly brackets, pragmatic-mathematic etc.
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole
Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg...
Comic sans is the preferred font of passive-aggressive clip-art smattered notes that use "quotes" for "emphasis" to explain that men of the dorm "must" rinse their shavings down the drain or that this is America and we speak "English".