Why does everyone hate the Comic Sans? Well, maybe not everyone, but a lot of people dislike it. In fact, graphic designer David Cadavy gave a whole Ignite Chicago talk on the topic. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Comic Sans”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Remember last year when European researchers announced that they discovered the Higgs boson? Huge scientific discovery. The basic building block of the universe. People called it the God particle.
Well, for many people, there was something even more shocking than this discovery. And that was the fact that scientists announced this momentous discovery in a PowerPoint presentation, the text of which was written in the font Comic Sans.
Not PowerPoint. Not Comic Sans. Comic Sans. And the blogosphere, or at least parts of the blogosphere, went nuts.
Well, my part did.
Yeah, your part did. My part did because, for many people, Comic Sans is the font you love to hate. Comic Sans. Oh, Comic Sans.
Yeah. Why do so many people hate it, Grant? I mean, are you a hater?
Are you a…
Yeah, definitely. That and Zaf Chancery. You use those, I automatically discount anything you put in print.
Right, right. I think it’s trying too hard or something.
Yeah, yeah. You’re like, oh, I’m not clever enough to be funny, so I’ll just use a funny font. Hey, this looks like it’s written with a felt-tip pen.
Well, there’s a funny but enlightening article about this online. It’s by graphic designer David Kadavy, and he rants about Comic Sans. He calls it the font of bake sales and birthday party invitations for three-year-olds.
But, Grant, one big insight that I got from his article was the fact that Comic Sans was invented back before our computers were equipped with what’s called anti-aliasing.
Do you know this? Yes, I know what anti-aliasing is, right? So instead of having a jaggy edge, you use the colors that are in the composite parts of the screen to make them a little lighter and darker so to the eye it looks like there’s smoothing happening there.
You knew that already. I come from an IT background.
Oh yeah, that’s right. I worked with art departments all over the place. We cared about that stuff.
Yeah, back then, before this technology that made fonts look smooth on screens, they looked sort of like little stacks of Legos, right?
Yeah, it was either black or white and there there wasn’t much variability there.
Yeah. And the truth is, if you look at a computer that doesn’t have that technology, then Comic Sans actually looks better than other fonts.
Oh, how about that? So it was a font before its time. So that makes me cut it a little bit more slack.
Maybe. Maybe it’s time to retire it.
Yeah. And if you have strong feelings about Comic Sans, you’ll really love this site called BanComicSans.com.
Oh, no. It’s great. It’s a beautiful site. It’s a tongue-in-cheek blog that’s devoted to putting the sands in Comic Sans.
And it has a little manifesto that starts, we believe in the sanctity of typography. That’s one of those things. It’s just like language peeves. You’ll never abolish Comic Sans. It’s here to stay.
Maybe not. I mean, they’re probably…
Well, you know, actually, we were talking about this on our Facebook page. And there were some people who said, but wait a minute, wait, I love that font.
Yeah, yeah. But it does… the no accounting for taste.
Yeah, it’s sort of like angel perfume. But really, let’s get back to the heart of what you said there. This is not the font to use to announce a world-shattering discovery. This is not the one.
Oh, exactly. Imagine the newspaper. Aliens, visit us. We are not alone. And it’s in Comic Sans. You just know. Use a strong serif typeface, right?
Yeah. Good verticals.
Right. Yes. Baskerville or Times New Roman.
Oh, but yeah, font nerd me. I used to be able to spec the entire Adobe font library on site. That’s how good I was.
Spec it? What does that mean?
That’s all the fonts in the Adobe library. I can look at it on a page and tell you what face it was, what part of the family, what the size was, maybe help you with the kerning and the letting, just by looking at it without tools.
Can’t do that anymore, though. It’s Hot Chat for Nerds right here. You can call us, 877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.
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