There’s a [thread=681797] thread now about ‘what was this font used in comics?’[/thread]. At least one reply about Comic Sans MS states simply that “it’s a terrible font.”
There also seems to be plenty of hate for Papyrus. I feel like I missed the memo when we were also supposed to get opinions about fonts. Is there an underlying cause for this? Was there a font watershed moment? Are papyrus and comic sans only used by Pharonic sociopaths and cartoon serial killers? Can anyone fill in the blanks?
I think it’s mostly that both of them are terribly overused, especially Comic Sans. There’s nothing INHERENTLY wrong with them, but they’re the go-to fonts for people who were hiding behind the door the day Web Design Talent was distributed.
No, they are used by people who did not get the memo about appropriate use of fonts. This means they are used by everyone new to computers or typesetting, every time, everywhere, in every circumstance, for every purpose, on every page, for every event and for every notice. That is why they are disliked.
Well, some people think Comic Sans is overused at best and at worst usually misused. It gives everything it’s used for a joky, silly, juvenile feel. I used to teach high school science- there’s just something wrong on a visceral level with using Comic Sans to print anything about academic topics.
I thought about these options. I’m hoping to get an answer with information in it, if one exists. If comic sans became déclassé after it was used in some manifesto against the New York Times, that would be worth knowing. If the dudes at Penny-Arcade led a rebellion against Papyrus because it was used by Bill Gates to diss Leeroy Jenkins, that would be contributory*.
Clearly, the mods will do what the mods deem to do. All hail the mods.
Generally I don’t care much about fonts - that is, until I get in the mood to pay attention. When I am in that mood, though, they are their own world, an intersection of art and utility. They’re tiny little paintings, strung together and relied upon all the time.
I daydream about experiments to see which ones are the easiest to read, computer automated studies that probe thousands of people, millions even. Secondary effects such as their influence on the message taken from written content fairly beg to be included.
Computing has made such a mess of it, though - confusing fonts and typefaces! proliferating a crazy big collection of fonts just so that content gets ruined porting it to another machine! trying to ruin every scientist who has no choice but to use special symbols in his slides!
I imagine a goodly work: creating several nice fonts and putting them into the public domain, with serif and sans versions including proportional and non proportional for each. I imagine doing principle component analysis on the glyphs themselves to try to derive an essence of “a”, and an essence of “b”, and so forth.
But then it stops amusing me and I’m back to Times New Roman for paragraphs, Arial for isolated lines, Courier New for tabular information and program code, and Symbol for what should have been ordinary characters in a larger character set to begin with.
I personally find Comic Sans to be clunky and ugly. It’s not the juvenile aspect of it–it’s just messy to my eyes and looks rushed and unbalanced from a design perspective.
Seriously. I picked them as an example because of the big Avenger dust-up. That said, I wound up getting an Avenger as a result. At my house we call it The Walker, cause it lets the old guy keep up with (read: smoke) the young guy.
I thought this thread was going to be a commercial for Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield. It’s a fun but rambling anecdotal book about the use and history of typefaces* and starts with a chapter on why everybody hates Comic Sans.
The short answer is that type is like everything is. A bunch of hipsters and snobs decided that anybody who didn’t think like them were inferior and said it loudly.
Proof? At the end of the book is a poll on best typefaces and worst typefaces. Several appear on both lists.
It’s obviously true that some fonts have superior readability. Some work better in large point sizes and some in small. There are zillions of specialized fonts for specialized uses. And they can be misused or overused. Designers have especially strong opinions on all this. The public got in the game back when Letraset lettering made every fanzine an unreadable jumble of badly aligned word-type things. Computers just added more and more fonts to the world. Typefaces are like books. Once only major publishers put them out. Now anybody can create one. There are over 100,000 fonts out there. Deciding which you use has as much science as which tile you use in your kitchen redesign. So yeah, this belongs in IMHO.
*The technical term for something like Comic Sans is a typeface. A font is Comic Sans Bold or Comic Sans Italic or Comic Sans Demi Condensed Bold Italic. Some typefaces have a hundred fonts. But he admits that he and everybody else use font all the time.
Sorry, gotta disagree a bit there. Comic Sans Bold or Comic Sans Italic are each typefaces. Comic Sans taken in total is a type family, or a family of typefaces.
A font, in the days of physical type, was the collection of objects used to set type in a particular face and size. So a font of 8pt Comic Sans Bold would be a case full of hundreds or even thousands of pieces of lead type. You could also have a font of matrices for a Linotype, Ludlow or Monotype.
These days, such as the distinction is made at all, typeface is used to refer to the design or appearance of, say, Comic Sans Bold. A font is the file used to create the type, something like ComicSansBold.TTF
