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.

Comments

Comic Sans

[lactose99]

Make everything Comic Sans, problem solved!

Re:Comic Sans

[darkain]

That's okay, I plan to have mine published in Wingdings

Re:Comic Sans

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Re:Comic Sans

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not funny, just pretentious.

Comic Sans has an actual use in the classroom for young readers and writers. It is the only font that has all of the following features at the same time:

a. It's widely available, installed on pretty much any computer some random Word or PowerPoint file might find itself.
b. The lower case "a" has a single loop and a small tail, the way it's usually taught for handwriting.
c. The lower case "g" has a single loop and a hook, the way it's usually taught for handwriting.
d. The "I" and "l" characters are easily distinguished (see what I did there?).
e. The "U" and "u" characters are easily distinguished.

Offended by fonts now?

[cyberchondriac]

This article is just trashy, nothing to see here. So, everything with an old English/German font means "Nazi" now, does it? It couldn't possibly just reflect medieval culture, or Frankenstein, or Dracula, or harken back to any number of other things more mundane in the past several hundred years. Nope, it's Hitler. I guess, if you're really that shallow.
But nothing is more telling of the actual SJ undercurrent and intent of this article than these last few paragraphs, strangely comparing Clinton's and Trump's campaign logos:

Hillary Clinton ran for president with a slick logo befitting a Fortune 100 company. It had detractors, but I think we’ll remember it fondly as a symbol of what could have been—clarity, professionalism, and restraint.

Donald Trump countered with a garish baseball cap that looked like it had been designed in a Google Doc by the man himself. This proved to be an effective way of selling Trump’s unique brand.

I guess even fonts offend these people now. They're losing their minds.

Re:Reading way to far into buts of propaganda

[ShanghaiBill]

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.