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If you love Comic Sans, or if you hate Comic Sans, have a look at what Comic Sans wanted to be when it grew up: Comic Neue.

You should also take a look at the Filmotype Apache/August/Beaver family. It's a "casual serif", which has been digitized under the names URW Apache, Panache Stanley and Sixpack, Cochise, Toledo, and Jester. Respected businesses use this family for their corporate branding, including ABCmouse Early Learning Academy and Harris Teeter Neighborhood Food and Pharmacy. It balances the bounciness and honesty of a hand-lettering typeface and the form variety of a dyslexia-friendly typeface with the dignity of a serif, and the best part is that it isn't Comic Sans.

It could, but it could also cause a resurgence of better casual typefaces, such as Comic Neue, JollyGood Sans, or Filmotype Apache/August/Beaver (digitized as Jester, Cochise, URW Apache, and Panache Stanley/Sixpack).

Placing it side by side with Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, almost all the characters are near-identical (though a bit lighter weight). The only two that differ are the zero (made worse by the ellipse), and the lowercase i, improved by a nice rightwards curl.

Looking at Hack, the first thing that jumped out at me is that the rightwards curl on the lowercase 'i' is way too long.

Placing it side by side with Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, almost all the characters are near-identical (though a bit lighter weight). The only two that differ are the zero (made worse by the ellipse), and the lowercase i, improved by a nice rightwards curl.

Tried it. Hated it. Back to Bitstream Vera Sans Mono 10pt in Zenburn.

Consolas is a good font, but I don't like the distinction between 1 and l. I think that incurs more cognitive overhead than it should. This kind of unobvious distinction is an issue with most fonts. For a long time I used Andale Mono (despite hearing fontophiles sneer at its esthetics) because the letter l is radically different from the digit 1. Then I discovered Vera Sans Mono, which has a similar letter l, and also has a narrow underbar, so that sequential underbars don't form a continuous line. I've often wondered why so many "programmer friendly" fonts overlook this issue: continuous underlining makes it easy to get the wrong number of underlines in things like __WEIRDCONSTANT.

Incidentally, both these fonts are designed by major font foundries, but are available for free. Andale Mono used to be part of Microsoft's free "core web font" program; that's long ended, but nobody seems to care about all the copies available on the web. The Vera Sans family appears to be Bitstream's donation to GNOME.

This discussion caused me to google "programmer fonts". Some interesting discoveries:

• There are a huge number of fonts designed by programmers who can't quite live with any existing font. Since scalable font design is a specialized skill, these are almost always simple bitmap fonts.
• Monofur is a very clever design. Which is precisely why I will never use it — too distracting.
• This font is designed around the assumption that "We need to re-engineer the alphabet so that it will be clear at extremely small sizes." I think this guy needs to get out more.

I've been using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono for almost a year now, at work. I find it a lot easier to look at for hours than Courier and something about Consolas bothers me. Don't judge it by that huge example on the site I linked. Install it and try it at 10 point.

#2- for a lot of projects, you can make good use of objects (boxes, etc) colors, and some good fonts. And if you want free fonts, I highly recommend larabiefonts.com [larabiefonts.com].

Don't pay for anything until you've spent an afternoon browsing through DaFont -- 4000 free fonts, many of which are worth having.

Also (and don't laugh!) get any old copy of CORELDRAW, even if the program is for another platform; it's ten years old and will be cheap as dirt. But, it has over a thousand perfectly usable typefaces in TrueType format.

I'm by no means a professional typographer, just someone with 8+ years of programming and, before that, 8+ years of graphic design, with a strong amateur interest in typography. So I appreciate real fonts, like you'd pay $400 apeice for from a professional font foundry, or the value of a whole spectrum of historically important type families. However, there is enough in these two font sources for almost anyone to get by on the cheap, as I presently do.

Taking some time (a few hours) to pick a nice sans-serif font (think Arial) for headlines and a complementary serif (think Times) for body text, can very quickly improve any project. By complementary I mean having similar letterforms. Look at the shape of the 'a', 'Q', and 'J' and especially the top of the 't', as well as the overall 'colour' (the density of the text) on the page.

One combination from the COREL CD that I'm doing a lot of work with at the moment is Context Condensed for headlines, together with Atlantix for body type. But experiemnt for yourself.