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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."
In early versions of Netscape, you could link to a remote font of your own choosing. The font-copyright people were up in arms about this, Microsoft didn't implement it in IE, and it was taken out of Netscape. That's why fonts on the web suck so much. You're either stuck with the lowest common denominator of fonts (Times Roman, Arial, Courier, or Comic Sans MS), or you can put a font into an image, which is silly but standard practice.
That's how we got into this mess.
Here's an example of a page that uses downloadable fonts. Unless you have a very old browser, it will look ugly. There's a more recent attempt to work around the problem with Flash. Wrong answer.
I'd imagine it's because no capital letters have descenders. They all fit nicely into boxes. That would make them easier to display than lower case letters.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Absolutely wrong. All uppercase letters are harder to read because our minds see blocks of text, not individual letters. When you change the fundamental shape of a word (by making it one big block of uppercase text), you make the reader stop and look at each individual letter, as opposed to seeing the word shape.
As for a citation, too many to post. I have a grad degree in Education with an emphasis in typography and cognition.
But Arial is bad, because it is a bad impersonation of Helvetica. Also, typographers will disagree with you that Helvetica is a bad font. I've read articles describing it as the nearly perfect font.
Uppercase are mostly straight lines and hence easier to carve.
At the bottom of the
My understanding is that it's easier to disambiguate one capital letter from another if the printing is degraded, but it's easier to read words in lower (or mixed-) case. For instance, a smudged or half-printed e, o, and c all might resemble each other, but E, O, C are easier to tell apart. It's a more resilient case.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Also, in addition to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps
From the article: "However, the shapes of words set in lowercase provide a valuable cue to readers that helps speed the process of reading; type in all caps forms a rectangular shape for every word, which makes distinguishing words harder."
I once read on a forum that it is on average %10 slower to read anything written in all capital then in mixed or lower case. This may not seem significant until one considers the ramifications for reading significantly long documents or the build up of lost productivity over years of reading terminal messages.
Lower-case letters have certain shapes--some hang down, some extend up, some are right in the middle. We learn to recognize these visual clues. Upper-case letters lack these visual clues. Instead, upper-case letters revert to a different shape, but these different shapes never vary by hanging below the line or above the line, because by definition of being upper-case, they take up the entire space.
WHEN YOU TYPE EVERYTHING IN UPPERCASE LETTERS THERE ARE NO LONGER ANY DESCENDERS OR ASCENDERS TO HELP DIFFERENTIATE THE SHAPES OF THE LETTERS. The reader then must slow down and look at each individual letter, then put the word together in their mind. If you don't believe me, take a 1,000 word document read it, then change it to all upper case, then read it again. Tell me you aren't slightly mentally fatigued upon the second reading (give yourself time to recover between readings).
Word shape is important. Take mono-spaced fonts for example. They may work well in writing lines of code or in spreadsheet columns (where it is helpful for the letters to line up), but in English prose, they are tiresome to read, because they completely eliminate the shape of words that we are used to reading. Again, change your paper to Courier, then try to read it. Tiresome.
> > It is easily readable
> Yes. Compared to, say, Wingdings.
Actually, it's one of only three or four fonts my sister (who teaches lower elementary school) is willing to use for classroom materials, because it's one of the only ones the kids can read, because it uses the simple letter forms they teach the kids in kindergarten. The biggest points of contention for most fonts are the lowercase letters a and g. A few other sans fonts use the simple-form g, but almost none of them use the simple-form lowercase a.
Now, one could argue that the schools *should* be teaching the normal lowercase forms that are ordinarily used in almost all print materials throughout the entire English-speaking world. But they *aren't*. (It may be partly because the more common forms are more complex and therefore require more coordination to write. A lot of kindergarten students struggle to get the stick on the right side of the circle for lowercase a, so asking them to write the Times form of the letter admittedly seems a bit much.)
Anyway, I would argue that Comic Sans is better than *several* of the other fonts from Microsoft's "Core Fonts for the Web" initiative.
Georgia and Verdana, of course, are clearly the best of the batch. They actually look good, and furthermore they look good together, which is a fairly big deal. You've got to have a basic serif and a basic sans font that look okay together, and this is a reasonably good pair. I've seen better pairs, but not *many* of them, and especially not ones that were available in 1996. Also, Georgia has a real actual honest-to-goodness italic face, which even manages to LOOK GOOD, which is a fairly rare quality. (I'm not a big fan of most italic faces, as a rule. If anybody knows of a freely-available sans-serif font that actually looks good in italic, I'd sure like to hear about it, because as yet I've not seen one.) Verdana runs a little on the large side, but you can fix that by decrementing the point size, so it's not exactly a deal-killer.
Impact and Andale Mono are acceptable for their intended purposes (wet paint signs and source code, respectively). Lucida Console is in some ways better than Andale Mono, but it's not freely redistributable. Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is alright, but it didn't come out until later.
But after that, really, the fifth-best one in the pack is Comic Sans. Bear with me...
Arial and Arial Black and Trebuchet aren't actively ugly, but they're mediocre, and more to the point they're also pretty redundant with other, better fonts from the same initiative (Verdana, Impact, and Verdana, respectively). Admittedly, Arial dates to Windows 3.x and thus is older than Verdana, but once Verdana was produce we no longer needed Arial for anything (because Verdana looks better), so why was it still included, why is it *still* included with Windows? Why? As for Trebuchet, I never understood why it was needed at any time. It was never *bad*, but it also never had anything to offer over other fonts that were already available.
Then we come to Times New Roman, which is uglier than a half-shaved mandrill, and Courier New, which is the most heinously hideous excuse for a font ever created in True Type format. (I've seen bitmapped screen fonts that were worse, but not many.)
I assume we're not going to try to compare Webdings with anything because, you know, it was never intended for the same basic purpose as the other core fonts (namely, typesetting actual words).
So, Comic Sans isn't the best font ever, but it's orders of magnitude nicer looking than TNR, to say nothing of Courier New, and furthermore it offers a significant stylistic difference from other available fonts, unlike Arial and Arial Black and Trebuchet. It's not as good as Verdana or Georgia, and its niche is (arguably) not as important as the ones for Impact and Andale Mono, but it still serves a useful purpose.
You don't like Comics Sans? Hey, fine, uninstall it from your computer, and websites that try to use it (and don't provide a fallback alternative) will render in whatever font you set as your browser's default. Voila.
But personally I don't see what's so bad about it.
Times New Roman is the one I wish was never created.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.