Comic Sans, Font of Ill Will

Kelson writes "The Wall Street Journal profiles Vincent Connare, designer of the web's most-hated font, Comic Sans. Not surprisingly, the font's origins go back to Microsoft Bob, where he saw a talking dog speaking in Times New Roman. Connare pulled out Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns for reference, and created the comic book-style font over the next week. 'Mr. Connare has looked on, alternately amused and mortified, as Comic Sans has spread from a software project at Microsoft Corp. 15 years ago to grade-school fliers and holiday newsletters, Disney ads and Beanie Baby tags, business emails, street signs, Bibles, porn sites, gravestones and hospital posters about bowel cancer. ... The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, nearly a decade old but stronger now than ever, thanks to the Web."

Comments

Taste the curb

[megabulk3000]

From the WSJ article: "An online comic strip shows a gang kicking and swearing at Mr. Connare." That would be this.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[TheRaven64]

Are you sure you are looking at Comic Sans on an Apple system and not Chalkboard? The two fonts are similar, but Chalkboard has nicer-looking letter shapes. The kerning may be slightly different between OS X and Windows, and OS X will place the font glyphs correctly and antialias, while Windows will round the locations off to the nearest pixel, which can cause Windows displays to appear to have incorrect kerning (it's a trade - Windows gives you better-looking characters in exchange for worse-looking words, OS X is the opposite way around).

On Ubuntu, you are seeing font substitution. A half-decent font rendering system will substitute a 'similar' font (where the value of 'similar' varies based on who wrote the substitution algorithm) when the requested font is not found. It seems that you do not have several of the fonts you are attempting to display installed, and so their outlines are being provided by a completely different font. This is a configuration issue.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[geekboy642]

What, you need a citation for the jargon file? Hand in your geek card, and go back to whatever pop culture meme site you came from.

Great Runes /n./

Uppercase-only text or display messages. Some archaic operating systems still emit these. See also runes, smash case, fold case.

Decades ago, back in the days when it was the sole supplier of long-distance hardcopy transmittal devices, the Teletype Corporation was faced with a major design choice. To shorten code lengths and cut complexity in the printing mechanism, it had been decided that teletypes would use a monocase font, either ALL UPPER or all lower. The Question Of The Day was therefore, which one to choose. A study was conducted on readability under various conditions of bad ribbon, worn print hammers, etc. Lowercase won; it is less dense and has more distinctive letterforms, and is thus much easier to read both under ideal conditions and when the letters are mangled or partly obscured. The results were filtered up through management. The chairman of Teletype killed the proposal because it failed one incredibly important criterion:

        "It would be impossible to spell the name of the Deity correctly."

In this way (or so, at least, hacker folklore has it) superstition triumphed over utility. Teletypes were the major input devices on most early computers, and terminal manufacturers looking for corners to cut naturally followed suit until well into the 1970s. Thus, that one bad call stuck us with Great Runes for thirty years.

Helvetica

[simonv]

If you haven't seen it yet, check out the movie Helvetica. It explains how a simple font has replaced nearly every other font for business logos and typeface. If you have netflix, It's still on instant play.
I never thought a font could be so interesting...

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent down.
 
The parent is so wrong, it's scary. One word, dude: Baudot. It's the predecessor to ASCII and was used to send telegrams by wire and wireless. Another word: teletype. That's where "TTY" comes from. The first computer user interface equipment was converted teletype equipment. Third word: descenders. The first teletype printers used a strip of paper, "ticker tape," to print on. Capital letters in Roman based character sets have no descenders (if Q is not stylized.) Capitals represented the most efficient use of the paper, and having only one case of characters made Baudot smaller-- fewer bits per character, fewer chances for error making the text illegible (until FEC and other transmission strategies came along.)
 
And who first realized that all caps make for efficiency? Stone masons. Ever seen a Greco-Roman building?

Re:Remember when HTML had fonts?

[hkfczrqj]

You might be aware of the current answer: CSS web fonts... now available in the current breed of beta/alpha browsers.