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

Similar to Windows hate?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[EdZ]

It is easily readable

Yes. Compared to, say, Wingdings.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[Waffle Iron]

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.

I AGREE. PRO TIP: THE MOST EASILY READABLE SUBSET OF ANY FONT IS THE CAPITAL LETTERS. YOU SHOULD ALWAYS USE CAPS TO MAKE YOUR MESSAGES EASIER TO READ.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[omnichad]

It's not a bad font, but people use it in completely wrong contexts.

If it stuck to speech balloons and the occasional kids' item, nobody would be against it.

The reason to hate it is that it's the Universal "Specialty" font. If you don't want a serif font, or a plain font like Arial, the first tool of choice is Comic Sans.

It's like when people use ketchup to make spaghetti sauce. It sort of works, but it's just wrong.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[omnichad]

That was funny. And hard to read.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[rackserverdeals]

The reason to hate it is that it's the Universal "Specialty" font. If you don't want a serif font, or a plain font like Arial, the first tool of choice is Comic Sans.

That's because it's the only web safe font that comes close to looking like hand writing.

There are very limited choices when it comes to choosing fonts for the web. You can't blame comic sans, but more the lack of choice.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[johny42]

[citation needed]

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

[citation needed]

That pretty much sums up religion in a nutshell.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[Hurricane78]

Is there a type of alphabet soup that comes in comic sans? I would have a wonderfully horrible idea of making GP post first die, and then turn in his grave:
1. Comic Sans alphabet noodles.
2. Ketchup.
3. Kraft parmesan.
4. OH TEH HORRORS. ^^

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.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[MBCook]

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.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[Hal_Porter]

the reason they went on to use only capitals? apparently you can't write the name of the christian deity in all lowercase.

Yes you can. It's not like he's going to strike you down with lighting bolts or something.

god

See, nothing ha

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[ciderVisor]

You'd need an upper-case 'Y', 'H' and 'W' for YHWH.

Interestingly, whilst this is often pronounced "Yahweh" or "Jehovah", written Hebrew doesn't actually supply any indication of what vowels should be inserted between the consonants. This means that the Abrahamic deity might actually have been called "Yahoo Wahoo" by His parents (or, seeing as this is a tech site - "Yahoo! Wahoo!").

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[Tubal-Cain]

Imagine how hard it would have been if he had used lowercase letters!

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[Bastard of Subhumani]

You can't really appreciate it properly unless you use it with the tag.

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:Similar to Windows hate?

[edittard]

You're just the kind of pedantic purist he was complaining about. Expecting people to use words with their actual meanings is totally unreasonable.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[stewbacca]

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.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[stewbacca]

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.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[edittard]

And who first realized that all caps make for efficiency? Stone masons. Ever seen a Greco-Roman building?

Uppercase are mostly straight lines and hence easier to carve.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[FooAtWFU]

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.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[Seraphim_72]

It is anti-religion so it must be true.

All you have to do is look at LEDs to see why caps were used. I have an ancient Control Data Calculator that can easily show you why caps are used.

I will go one step further and tell you your post makes you look like a bigot. Every quirk in the world is not the fault of religion, get over it already.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[abolitiontheory]

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.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[digitig]

And "A" for Allah.
And "B" for Baal.
And "C" for Ceridwen.
And "D" for Demeter.
And "E" for Ereskigal.
And "F" for Frigg.
And "G" for Ganesha.
And "H" for Horus.
And "I" for Ishtar.
And "J" for Juno.
And "K" for Krishna.
And "L" for Loki.
And "M" for Mithras.
And "N" for Neptune.
And "O" for Osiris.
And "P" for Pan.
And "Q" for Quetzalcoatl.
And "R" for Rama.
And "S" for Shen-Yi.
And "T" for Tiamat.
And "U" for Uzume.
And "V" for Vulcan.
And "W" for Xi Wang-mu.
And "X" for the other bit of Xi Wang-mu.
"Y" for Yhwh, as you say, and the other bit of Shen-Yi
and "Z" for "Zeus".
Talk about a loose specification? "The Deity"?

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[stewbacca]

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.

Re:Similar to Windows hate?

[jonadab]

> > 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.

Not only e-mails

[adamjaskie]

I've gotten change requests and requirements specs in Comic Sans.

awesome font!

[rubycodez]

I'm going to start using it at work, often. it fits. I hope it infuriates many.

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:I asked a professional graphic artist . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, she's going out with you... So there's no accounting for taste.

Re:Similar to Windows hate? NOPE

[Hurricane78]

Hey, it was a job as a beach lifeguard, you insensitive clod!

Re:Font-Snob

[StreetStealth]

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.

Remember when HTML had fonts?

[Animats]

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.

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.

A much worse example

[whereverjustice]

Last year I visited the museum at Rideau Hall, the official residence of the Governor General of Canada (the representative of the Queen). They had a copy there of the royal letter formally appointing the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. It was set in Comic Sans. I am completely serious.

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...