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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."
Comic Sans itself isn't a bad font. It is easily readable, and more than anything else, that is the best measure of a font.
Just because it is so popular people hate it. It's like people hating on pop stars, Windows, and Kraft Parmesan cheese.
Popular doesn't mean bad. On the contrary, it means it fits the needs of many people.
It is not related to be easy to read or not, or because it is widely used or not.
I just hate when someone delivers a report written in comic sans ms OR even WORSE, submits a paper written in that font.
It's like going to a job interview with sandals and bathsuit.
New phrase: "font-snob"
Call them what you will, but industrial design and attention to detail is often grossly overlooked. It's why Mac is converting hordes of longtime PC users and why Ubuntu is the most popular linux distro. It's why Adobe is a multi-billion dollar company and why black Myriad text on a white background is instantly recognizable as an Apple ad. It's why I can no longer look at non anti-aliased fonts outside the terminal.
As a user who upgraded to Fedora 7 from Fedora Core 6 after the Liberation fonts switchover, I can say that the impact must be experienced to be believed.
see this study: http://www.surl.org/usabilitynews/81/PersonalityofFonts.asp
and this one proves (even with a tiny sample) that kids love this font: http://psychology.wichita.edu/mbernard/articles/UPAfontchildrenpaper.pdf
Yeah, it's (somewhat) easy to read, but it's only suitable for kids books. The problem is that it's been used in all the places the summary mentions, and the person who chose to use it obviously had zero knowledge about fonts. Some fonts are used for content, some for presentation, others are easier to read on computer screens and others are suited for print.
Learn your goddamn fonts or stick to the defaults in MS Office. Arial is a sans-serif font, easier to read on computers (so it's used in Outlook & Excel). Times New Roman is used in Word because serifs help guide the eye along the line in large blocks of text. These fonts are overused and boring, but at least they don't distract the reader from the message.
Design is a lot like software development in this respect.
If something is poorly designed, and you aren't a designer, you may not notice it at first, just as if something is poorly coded and you're not a developer, you may not immediately sense just how unoptimized the software is.
But as you use it more, the deficiencies manifest themselves in your own frustration. Poor design makes things hard to follow and taxing to use, just as poor software development makes things sluggish and unstable. The work of a skilled designer will always be more enjoyable to use over time, just as the work of a skilled developer shows through in a solid and stable product.
I may be a font snob, but I'm also a stability snob, a performance snob, a usability snob, and a number of other snobberies.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Comic Sans font fills a unique slot that no other widely available (read: free) font provides. It allows an informal alternative to the other too formal and stuffy fonts for purposes that don't want to be all officious.
I feel that it's biggest drawback is it's name. (If you don't think a name can hurt you, try to tell someone to use GIMP, or even worse, Qtpfsgui.) If Comic Sans had been called Informal Sans I believe that there would be much less angst over it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Except that those 40,000 alleged witnesses are mostly dead. And only a few handfuls of them bothered to write about it. And the research that was done, was largely done some 50 years after the alleged event. And some who were there claimed not to see anything unusual. And not one single astronomer or scientist happened to notice anything. And the researchers were frustrated by hugely inconsistent and conflicting eyewitness reports. And dust clouds, self-delusion, parhelion, mass hysteria and UFOs are all vastly more likely explanations than "ghost man inna sky dunnit".
Further, why the hell would an all-powerful being make the sun dance and change colors? Is God trolling us for the lulz?