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How Fonts Are Fueling the Culture Wars (backchannel.com)
Reader mirandakatz writes: Typography is having a bit of a moment: Suddenly, tons of people who don't work in design have all sorts of opinions about it, and are taking every opportunity to point out poor font choices and smaller design elements. But they're missing the bigger picture. As Medium designer Ben Hersh writes at Backchannel, typography isn't just catchy visuals: It can also be dangerous. As Hersh writes, 'Typography can silently influence: It can signify dangerous ideas, normalize dictatorships, and sever broken nations. In some cases it may be a matter of life and death. And it can do this as powerfully as the words it depicts.' Don't believe him? He's got ample visual examples to prove it.
your != you're
There was a recent article in the Economist about publishing in the Arab World. With the turmoil in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, Arabic publishing is dying. In Beirut bookstores, 40% of the books are in English, 40% in French, and only 20% in Arabic. Part of this is because Arabic is designed to be written by hand, and not printed. The shape of individual "letters" depends on the preceding and following "letters", much like English cursive, except even worse.
We take it for granted that we can type any word with a keyboard, but really, you should check your anglophone privilege.
Never mind the inconsistent voice and poor writing overall...
I don't know why everyone hates comic sans...
As with everything, it's Microsoft's fault. /s
In the mid/late 90s, the PC revolution meant that Microsoft Word became ubiquitous. Word made it easy to put together a "publication ready" document. Now, instead of having publishing software and tools in the hands of an elite group of users, steeped in the craft of typography, anyone with a computer could do it.
But Word didn't present these new users with any of the arcane knowledge of when to use which font that typography experts had. No one was teaching them the significance of serif versus sans serif. It didn't talk about the cultural implications of humanist typefaces. -- No, it just presented a simple drop-down box containing every font on the system, and left it to the user to pick one that they wanted, with little to no guidance.
Combined with this is the advent of the Internet for the masses, and particularly in Internet standardization. Comic Sans was one of the fonts picked as a standard web font -- and for good reason! It's very useful for short text in comic-like settings. That's what it was designed for - a font that could be used in dialog bubbles in computer-produced versions of things like Batman and Spiderman comics. The early web standardizers saw the use of such a font for various things on the internet, like info boxes and captions, etc. It wasn't intended as the main font on a primarily-text document, but if it wasn't included in the standard, you couldn't count on it for even the odd usage.
But all this consideration was lost on the users of Word - no one bothered to tell them what the intent of the font was, or give them any information or guidance in picking the font they want to use(1). Nope. Users were forced to randomly try fonts, and pick what they thought was best. And since they were (*sniff*) "the masses", they picked what they thought looked nice. All the esoteric considerations that knowledgeable typography experts apply are thrown out the window. And Comic Sans *does* look nice - in small doses (which is all you get when you have novices trying fonts out). Also, when compared to the other fonts you had available at the time, it stood out. (Let's be honest: from a high-level perspective, there's not much difference between Times New Roman and Garamond. You'd have to be a typography expert to explain in which situations you'd prefer one over the other.)
So a large number of people picked Comic Sans, thinking they were being sophisticated by not leaving Word to use the default typeface. This lead to the use of Comic Sans in a number of situations where it was just not done, according to the typography elite. It quickly became a way to separate those with typographical sophistication from the hoi polloi. We can all get together and laugh at the naiveté of those uncouth barbarians who pick Comic Sans. We all get behind a movement to Ban Comic Sans as a form of virtue signalling. Being against Comic Sans is not so much about having objections about the use of the font (which, don't get me wrong, there *are* valid reasons for), but about associating yourself with the type of people who are against the font (i.e. the literate, learned, cultured people who care about typefaces).
tl;dr - People hate Comic Sans because Microsoft eliminated the barrier to entry in publishing for people without typographical knowledge.
1) Heck, even today, with all the typography snobs running around, no one has really put together a good "so you know nothing about typography, but want to pick a font" guide -- well, except for the guides which are a one liner: "Use Helvetica."
It quickly became a way to separate those with typographical sophistication from the hoi polloi.
"The hoi polloi" is like saying "the La Brea tar pits" or "The big Rio Grande river".
And never mind it's mostly not even about fonts, but rather different language scripts. The vast majority of the article compares German blackletter (not so much English blackletter), Arabic, Cyrillic, Croatian, etc.
Yes, Arabic looks quite different from Germanic Fraktur and Russian Cyrillic. And...??
Different fonts (a.k.a. "typefaces" for the older crowd) are about things like x-height and whether you use serifs and proportional vs. monospace and descenders/ascenders and use of text vs. display weights. TFA doesn't seem concerned with most of that at all, instead focusing on completely different letterforms in different languages, which isn't really a font issue as much as a linguistic one. The only real typeface issues that are brought up at the end of the article contrast the bizarre abstract Hillary logo with the simple script used for "Make America Great Again!" for Trump hats. Except again -- that's really not much of a "font" issue (though yes, a font was chosen for each) as a complex typographical design difference. One is creating a weird logo vaguely based on a letterform; the other is an actual sentence that needs to be typeset in a recognizable script.
Broadly speaking, the article is somewhat about typography. But it isn't really about fonts, so I'm not sure what they're in the title at all.
Handwriting? What's that?
BTW, SIL (an international missionary organization that does Bible translation) has produced many free fonts (you may even have heard of the "SIL Font License", which some other free fonts use). Because Bible translation is usually done for pre-literate or newly literate cultures, the Andika font (https://www.sil-lead.org/blog/2013/8/18/andika). I don't know how it compares with Comic Sans in your list of desiderata, though.
For the record, SIL produces a wide variety of other fonts, including Cyrillic, Greek and fonts for other non-Roman scripts (http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php). They're Beta testing a Nasta'liq font--if you know anything about Nasta'liq, you probably know that it's one of the hardest styles in the world to typeset. SIL (through a former member, Jonathan Kew) is also the creator of XeTeX (now maintained by others).