This is one of the most hated fonts in the world.
How did you feel reading that text? Disgusted? Offended? Did you have a generally adverse reaction to it? Or maybe you got immediately amused, thinking of all the memes and facebook parody videos made about it. Either way, it can be generally assumed that your first reaction wasn’t a positive one. This obviously wasn’t the intention of Vincent Conare, who, in 1994, designed Comic Sans to be a font used for the speech bubbles of the “tutorial dog” in old Microsoft computers. Being inspired by the fun, engaging fonts in comic book strips, Conare wanted to design a font that was looked interesting and handwritten. In addition, it was originally made to be engaging for a younger audience and legible on a computer screen. The intention is innocent enough, so why did Comic Sans become one of the world’s most hated font?
TECHNICAL DESIGN OF THE TYPEFACE
Starting with the technicalities, Comic Sans is an unmodulated font, meaning that the thickness of the lines is mono-width all throughout the font. This leads to a generally unevenly weighted font with the example of the letter n compared between the Helvetica, a very beloved font, and Comic Sans.
For the letter n in Helvetica, it is almost unnoticeable, but the link between the stem and shoulder is thinner than the aperture of the rest of the letter which balances the letter out. When squinting and comparing the two letters together, it can be seen that Comic Sans is unevenly balanced. In addition, because of this imbalance, the kerning of the letters is uneven and makes the overall arrangement of the letters look uneven.
However, the font was initially created in order to look like a fun, young, handwritten font that can be easily read on a grainy, old-school computer screen. So can it really be faulted by being uneven? In fact, when comparing readability of Times New Roman compared to Comic Sans, it shows that Comic Sans is actually easier to read than Times New Roman.
Okay, so if the font does exactly what it was designed to do, and does it well? Why do people still hate it so much?
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FORMAL AND INFORMAL WRITTEN PIECES
If you were writing a resumé, would you use a font like Georgia or Impact The general answer would be Georgia. So why is this case? A study was conducted by academics at Wichita State University in Kansas in the 2000s showed that in general people thought that serif fonts like Times New Roman and Georgia were more suitable for the formal texts while sans serif fonts like Impact were for more graphic design, and fun, written texts.
The issue concerning Comic Sans is that once it was designed in 1994, people started using it in contexts that it was not created for. It would be used for large-scale billboards, documentation, and advertisement. Evidently, people weren’t too happy about this, and there was even an online petition advocating for the ban of Comic Sans.
As typographers, it is important to be aware of the use of specific fonts and the appropriate time to use them. Otherwise, a font and its creator could be wrongly hated as a result of it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Bryce, Emma. “Why Do People Hate Comic Sans So Much?” LiveScience, Purch, 20 Jan. 2019, www.livescience.com/64543-why-people-hate-comic-sans-font.html.
Kadavy, David. “Why You Hate Comic Sans.” Design for Hackers, 27 Feb. 2017, designforhackers.com/blog/comic-sans-hate/.
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