Comic Sans and its descendants are... indestructible. No matter how much some font designers complain about it, and how often they criticize it, Comic Sans keeps coming back, like the Terminator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Sans#Reception_and_use_i...
Among the most incongruous uses of Comic Sans I've seen, a few stand out:
I've always been quite irritated by the amount of disdain toward Comic Sans.
Partly because I feel like this is such an easy target, and people who have just learned 2 or 3 things about typography are very keen on bashing Comic Sans to show off their newly acquired knowledge.
Partly because, let's face it, it's not that bad. What it does, it does well, it's pretty legible, no glyph stands out from the general harmony, etc.
There's a reason it became massively used. It was included in windows because it was part of Microsoft Chat, which back then was heavily comic book styled, with speech bubbles for messages etc (something that has since then become a standard in IM). It appeared in the font drop-down list, and people picked it when they wanted their message to look a bit informal, not too severe. Of course, someone with design knowledge is able to achieve this without resorting to this specific font (or even a funny font), but most people lack this knowledge.
Overused/Overplayed. Legible/Catchy. Well crafted for its original purpose. Gets no respect. Probably deserves a little, but it makes you feel dirty to give it.
It's virtually impossible to have a deep design-related discussion without it sounding to naive ears as pretentious. Design is the art of arranging things so as to evoke particular feelings in people. To discuss them is to discuss the feelings they're evoking vs the feelings that were intended to be evoked. And there's only so far you can get with the sorts of words ordinary people use to talk about their feelings. And nobody likes to hear that other people might feel and perceive deeper than them.
Same as every crack addict on a come down, surely?
I'm not sure if Britney Spears had pushy parents, but I think that's the analogy with Comic Sans. Abusively pushy and demeaning, trying to criticise when the flaws are those of the beholder and bestowing outrageous praise for imaginary achievements.
I'm glad to hear solid defence of Comic Sans here because whatever it is, it's sui generis, unto itself true. Which I think is the most attractive character trait at the same time as provoking extreme reactions of self projection in observers.
Sure. If you’re targeting a similar audience as Apple or other high end brands. My point is that there’s a different kind of audience for comic sans or its variants.
I don't have any typographical basis to dislike Comic Sans. I just dislike it because it's ugly to the point of irritation for reasons I can't articulate. I suspect most people dislike it for reasons more similar to mine than because they have some principled basis for disliking it.
You're not wrong. As fan of single-storey (your "normal") "a" and "g", a few additional examples do, however, come immediately to mind:
Classic example: Futura.
Modern examples:
Apple fonts: Monaco uses both single-storey "a" and "g"; San Francisco uses single-storey "g" by default, and includes single-storey "a" in stylistic sets.
The Adobe Source (Code, Sans) and IBM Plex (Sans, Serif, Mono) font families include both single-storey "a" and "g" as alternate glyphs accessible through OpenType stylistic sets.
I just hate all handwritten fonts for passages of text because a single character looks the same every time it appears, which is very unrealistic and cringe-worthy for emulating handwriting.
There are handwritten-like fonts which avoid that problem, by having several versions of each glyph and choosing one randomly for each letter. Some of them even introduce some random variation in the shapes to replicate true handwritten text.
I am not a font designer, but I don't like Comic Sans for the same reason I don't like Las Vegas architecture that resembles ancient Rome or Egypt, even though I am not an architect.
That's my point: comic sans is the Vegas of fonts.
People who dislike it aren't trying to show off the "2 or 3 things that have learned on typography", they are simply not blind and can see its ugliness.
But apparently people got offended when I've said that there's no need to be an architect to understand that Vegas has no architectural value...
There's no special quality that makes comic sans good if you look close enough, it's just bad, 20 dollars WiFi router bad, LIDL shoes bad, IKEA lack table bad, Caesar Palace Forum shop bad, something that looks okeish from afar but that's not even good enough for casual use.
Nobody would live and raise a family in a Treasure Island hotel room, nobody would seriously use comic sans to write code and look at it 8+ hours a day.
I can't find where I read this, but I thought Comic Sans makes text easier to read for people with dyslexia. A pretty narrow use-case, I agree, but there's at least one redeeming quality from something so ugly.
There are fonts that were actually designed to be dyslexic-friendly, but they tend to be uglier; Comic Sans is a middle ground that doesn't slow non-dyslexics as much.
hmm, you're right I got confused by the reference L. Evett and D. Brown. Text formats and web design for visually impaired and dyslexic readers-clear text for all. Interacting with Computers, 17:453–472, 2005. and took it to mean that they recommended Comic Sans for visually impaired readers with dyslexia as well, but it seems they don't have comic sans in the list of fonts they actually tested.
On LinkedIn I saw a Master's Degree diploma in Comic Sans shown by a recent graduate. As it happens the University is local and I have colleagues that graduated from there so I had to ask one about it. He confirmed that his at least is in the more typical gothic-y serif style font.
I truly don't understand why. Are people just that sick of Times New Roman and Calibri? It's not like I especially hate Comic Sans, but it seems so wildly inappropriate for all of the uses mentioned above.
I hadn't before now and am going with "yeah, brilliant". I don't think I've seen anything Ryan Gosling's done that I haven't liked him in; to the point of a bit of a man-crush.
Some of these aren't that bad. I think once you get past five letters in a row or start adding apostrophes, it's time to use something else. A couple letters with some customization can work though, e.g. I don't think the Lamb of God logo is bad.
Actually "Sans Bullshit Sans" (http://www.sansbullshitsans.com/) name is more inappropriate. "Comic Mono" or "Comic Sans" names sound better. Also "Comic Mono" font is not bad, just takes a bit getting used to. I'm using "Roboto Mono Light" at 14px for code and love it.
For a long time I thought it was called "Comic" because of the hilarious faces font snobs pull when you show it to them, but apparently it's because it was inspired by the text in comic books.
I think it's sort of transcended all that, though. It's now the legendary Comic Sans from the land beyond taste, more meme than font.
So you're trying to convince us you legitimately though it was named, before anyone saw it, based on a presumed reaction people would have when they did?
Pardon me, I think my bullshit meter just exploded.
Originally designed for Microsoft Bob, missed that deadline, came out in the Win95 Plus Pack.
The working name was "Comic Book". Probably because it is based on multiple comic books, primarily The Dark Knight Returns. I've also seen Watchmen mentioned in other interviews as a primary source for the shapes though he doesn't mention it in his page on the font.
This is true. Calibri takes effort to peruse. I confuse letters and words all the time and have to reread after losing context. Comic sans is certainly not the worst font out there.
When writing my dissertation, I found that changing the font to Comic Sans or Papyrus is an effective way of forcing myself to be self-critical and preventing myself from, for lack of a better phrase, "falling in love" with what I wrote (the "scholarly" classic-looking fonts like Sabon, Garamond, Baskerville tend to have that effect on me)
In fact it's been so long since I've seen anyone use it for powerpoint slides (or anything really) that when I came across the "Wearing the hair shirt" talk recently I was hit with a nice nostalgic feeling: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/wearing...
Yeah, I think this is one of those things that keeps being recommended for writer's block or proofreading to shake you up and give you a fresh perspective.
Any visual change lets you see what you've written from a different perspective. Changing the font, changing the formatting (e.g. margins,) changing the page size, and (especially for me) reading it in a different format.
I learned this trick from someone years ago. (I think they specifically suggested reading it in a different format?) I wonder if it has a name...
Shame. While the new design is not bad, it looks sort of overproduced, which goes against the spirit of the movie. The older one, whatever its source may be, had a sort of raw unpolished elegance to it that that fit in nicely with the movie's theme.
Seconded. I had to tweak the spacing, otherwise on it was too condensed on my Mac but the mono version feels slightly less cartoonish to me and is actually not bad at all. At first glance that only thing that annoyed me was that + and - didn't align perfectly.
Adobe used Myriad as a corporate identity face for nearly a decade before Apple.
Garamond has a rather more extensive history, but, suffice it to say that, in terms of typography at least, 1984[1] was not entirely unlike Nineteen Eighty-Four[2].
As someone who creates software for the education space, in my experience Comic Sans is picked in schools because it has the 'a' in the shape that you actually write an 'a'. This helps when teaching primary school children.
Some schools will got out of their way to buy special fonts but most will default to Comic Sans because it is ubiquitous.
Not really a criticism and just an observation, but you can tell this page was written by a programmer because the section called "What does it look like?" is about what the code looks like, not the font itself.
I realize the page's text is in the font, but often there's a sample that shows what all the common characters look like and in different variations (like regular and bold). Which is what I expected when I read that section title.
I mean, if I'm looking for a monospace font, I'm probably either in a terminal or writing some code. If I'm trying to create a beautiful document, I'll probably use some variably-spaced thing inside LaTeX or something. I think showing me a big sample of code is genuinely the most useful way for me to get a "feel" for how the font is going to perform.
I’ve used this font in all diagrams of my book. Together with svg shape filtering, it achieved a great handwriting look. You can find sample chapters here if curious: https://sw46.github.io/pip-book
I will say this, using Comic Sans when we sent out Early Childhood material to parents got a much better response than using "formal" fonts. I guess it didn't look like bills, so people actually looked at it.
So many shades of yes!
I am dyslexic, and comic sans is one of the few fonts that is eminently readable to me.
They’re is dyslexie mono too, which is nice. ( https://www.dyslexiefont.com )
Hmm, your andecdata is not backed by studies, it seems https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5934461/ - the paper concludes, any more or less normal font works for dislexic readers, too. Interletter spacing (but not too mich) and font size help, though.
Genuine question, from a non-dyslexic; does this monospace version of Comic Sans retain the same "easier-for-dyslexic-people" properties as the one that you'd use in a word processor?
You might be in the minority but I'm in the same boat. I just installed this font as a joke for a screenshot to send to a friend in my terminal...but I actually think I'm going to keep it. It's very easy to read, and very "clean" feeling.
I've been using Comic Code for more than a year now. I can't claim any non-placebo improvement, but it is a perfectly good font, not worse than any monospaced font I used before.
I think due to the monospaced style as well as a relatively
small font size it looks a lot more regular and just...less
boring than other fonts. I was positively surprised, too.
While not Comic Sans, another Microsoft Web Core font which has been reasonably cloned is Trebuchet MS. Fira is, to my eyes, an open source font which looks similar to Trebuchet MS, and there is the very popular monospace variant Fira Code: https://v-fonts.com/fonts/fira-codehttps://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
Just gave JetBrains mono a spin. I like the design; a bit plain but pretty readable. I had to go in to FontForge and fix what I felt were some issues with the font:
* I prefer a stroke instead of a dot in to 0 (zero)
* While JetBrains mono has an alternate form with a 0 stroke, the stroke is too thin.
* The smart quotes, such as “” look too much like each other. I edited them to give the font Verdana-style smart quotes (where “ and ‘ point to the left)
* The “c” looks too much like “o”. I have opened up the bowl in c so it’s distinct from “o”.
* I aggressively subsetted the font to have only English, Spanish, and some basic typography (smart quotes, em dash, bullet, right arrow). This reduces the size, which means I could make it a webfont in the future.
I'm also here with you. I don't get the issue. I know some fonts are more easily readable than others. I can understand the argument that maybe some fonts cause more strain than others. But there are other commenters who are saying that this font type is evoking emotions from them, particularly negative emotional ones. I don't get it.
Like music or art, I think that one starts to see, and appreciate, nuances as one learns and experiences more. If you’re drawn to the beauty and nuance of fonts, you start to develop preferences and appreciations for details. If you’re simply utilitarian in your font use (which is perfectly fine, of course), you probably don’t care about much beyond legibility. I find some fonts aesthetically beautiful, and some awful (Comic Sans is in the middle for me, though closer to awful), but I don’t expect others to share my tastes: I like jazz and filling out tax forms, too.
My hot take is that Hacker News isn’t immune from having an online community status quo, it’s just a different one. The averaged out HN perspective is one of hyperbolic ridicule. And honestly it’s fine! You’ll never have an online community without this effect, or really any community. The same group also generates extremely useful content more often than not, I’m still thankful we have this :)
I once worked with a guy who wrote everything in Comic Sans - despite being counseled about it repeatedly. Fonts set a "tone" to your writing, and while Comic Sans if maybe fine for inviting people to in impromptu office pizza party, it represents yourself poorly in a professional environment. Here's some examples of how inappropriate some of his emails were (all real):
- Contract negotiations
- HR issues
- Announcing the unexpected death of a co-worker
- Announcing layoffs on a contract loss
It looked ridiculous. It also turns out he was a terrible employee and manager. The two seem to be pretty correlated.
For me, this makes it farce. Partly because the guy continues to do it after learning it bugs everyone else, and partly because of the earnestness around what fonts someone uses in office emails.
My guess is that you were driven to that level of earnestness. What was it like to have a disagreement with this guy about something that mattered (more)?
The best short descriptive word I can come up with is "absurd".
It was clearly part of a carefully crafted social image he was trying to portray. It included signing emails with "wise sayings", fortunes, and platitudes like "let your inner light shine the way for others" and other nonsense, long rambling speeches about how we're all each other's brother, and a bizarre need to try to protect the worst performing employees from even minimal levels of accountability.
In practice he was pure chaos to work with and never contributed anything meaningful to our work despite having a great looking resume (including stints at some FAANGs and top schools). When cornered about actual technical work he was supposed to be doing he just became annoyingly evasive and tried to redirect the conversation into some kind of drum-circle feelings session.
It was like a cheap con-artist, a yoga class, and a fortune cookie had a baby.
Font "representing one poorly in a professional environment" sounds to me pretty much the same as insisting on strict dress code, banning facial hair, black or traditional hairstyles, etc.
My favorite inappropriate use case was the death notice of a law partner in a legal newspaper (law firms commonly take out small adverts to announce the arrival or departure of partners). I don't know if this was a terrible failing on the part of the person who bought the ad, or a subtle acknowledgement of the decedent's preferences.
It has a late 50s Italian photoplotter with baked enamel in drab pastel pastiche to it. Looks nice. I don't even know if photoplotters were a thing in the 50s, I guess they are now.
Honestly this isn’t bad. I can see it being particularly useful for code examples or situations where you want code to appear playful or otherwise less stodgy to the user. API documentation and blog posts come to mind.
Definitely deserves a run in the editor at the very least.
Love this.
Once while studying the uses of programming font preferences on Hackernews (http://www.highdimensionalcoconuts.com/Work/FontResearch/pro...), I found a single vote for Comic Sans. The motivation: “to remind me to be humble”.
I really appreciated the sentiment, though the kerning on Comic Sans makes this a visual nightmare for programming. Having a monospaced variant is a nice feature for programmers.
Comic Shanns (the base of this font) released an update ~12h ago that include a whole bunch of diacritics. If you like Comic Mono, you may wish to run the converter script using the new CShanns release.
I dislike how the font has no italic and renders using an ugly faux italic (the browser makes it oblique with too much slant, and it ends up too far to the right). And the FontForge-bolded version is not significantly bolder than before, which is understandable because Comic Sans is already heavy.
The original Comic Sans comes with regular, bold, and in Windows 8.1 and above, italic and bold italic as well.
I think it's the kerning, or when we are being funny, 'keming' which is a visual pun (when kerning goes wrong, kerning and keming are homographs).
Ironically, the text I had the hardest time reading on their example page was the name of the font itself: Comic Mono has all the letters running together.
Unfortunately Comic Shanns doesn't render its own name in the examples that I see, but you can see that the capital C has another pixel between it and the next letter.
ETA: Author generated this font via the use of some scripts, which are inline near the bottom. There's a line about target_width in there, I'm curious what happens if you bump that from 510 to 530...
Comic Sans has gained a cultural meaning beyond it's design, which is why it's inappropriate for any official publications.
Personally I have more fun spotting the "Jokerman" font in public. It is often chosen to display creativity or playfulness by people who appear to lack the skill to expand the Windows font selection.
I totally agree with you. I’m no fan of Comic Sans, but monospaced it’s really quite nice. I think Comic Shanns does things like set all the characters on the baseline, eliminate goofy tilting, etc. The letter shapes themselves are nice.
> I think Comic Shanns does things like set all the characters on the baseline, eliminate goofy tilting, etc.
I think this is the biggest trick. I'm no font expert, but my understanding is that the base of Comic Sans is fine, it's just that there are so many small "errors" [0] that make it a pain to look at.
[0] Many of which had perfectly valid reasons for the time.
I know that it's controversial, but I really feel using Comic Mono for coding reduces cognitive strain ... I've been using it as my main coding font for a while now.
This discussion is quite the testament to the incredible influence of Comic Sans when people are raising fuss over it when it’s not even the topic of the thread!
Never thought I would ever see this during my lifetime. Really well done. Has the quirky feel of Comic Sans, but with the flavor of fixed space mono fonts.
A lot of what makes Comic Sans so ugly (lack of consistency or uniformity) also happens to make it more legible for people with dyslexia or similar reading disabilities.
All the times I've read along people bashing some 'asshole' who insisted on Comic Sans for everything, now I'm wondering how often the 'asshole' had dyslexia and the other people were the real assholes...
I've been using Comic Mono as my non-code IDE font for years. It clashes obviously with the font I use for the code, which makes it easier to parse context for me.
I think there's a few reasons. It is used a lot in schools because it purportedly is good for students with dyslexia and resembles handwriting. Some use of it can be contributed to irony, but I think for a lot of laymen who don't care or know much about fonts they just think it's neat.
Kitsch (/kɪtʃ/ KITCH; loanword from German)[a][1] is art or other objects that, generally speaking, appeal to popular rather than "high art" tastes. Such objects are sometimes appreciated in a knowingly ironic or humorous way.[2][3][4] The word was first applied to artwork that was a response to certain divisions of 19th-century art with aesthetics that favored what later art critics would consider to be exaggerated sentimentality and melodrama. Hence, "kitsch art" is closely associated with "sentimental art". Kitsch is also related to the concept of camp, because of its humorous and ironic nature.
Among the most incongruous uses of Comic Sans I've seen, a few stand out:
* A plaque on a large statue of a historical figure in a public space: https://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/nacional/region-metropol...
* A letter announcing the creation of new political party in Greece, breaking off with the then-current Prime Minister: https://web.archive.org/web/20151004131442/http://www.volosn...
* A letter to the US Congress from the legal team defending the President against impeachment proceedings: https://www.fastcompany.com/90414127/trumps-old-lawyers-real...
Thankfully, in these examples the authors chose not to use a different color for each letter!