[Tonight’s Top Comments diary is a cultural potato chip. Don’t look for anything deep here—just empty calories.]
It appears I missed something. It’s not unusual for me to miss things because my head is usually in the clouds. So, various cultural memes pass me by, and then years later, I discover it was a thing, or maybe it still is a thing. Like this thing about Comic Sans.
A few months ago, I heard two different people in different contexts saying nasty things about Comic Sans. For me, this raised two questions: 1. What the hell is is Comic Sans? 2. Why do people hate it so much?
Answers below the fold, but first, a word from our sponsor:
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I recognized from its name that Comic Sans must be a font style, but beyond that, I was clueless. I suspect some of you will roll your eyes and ask what rock I was living under for the past 20 years, but the truth is, I had never heard of it, and never paid any attention to it in the list of font choices in MS Word. The dizzying and ever lengthening number of font designs just gets ridiculous, not unlike the flavors of beer or ice cream—or both. (Do we really need a Neapolitan milk stout?) My philosophy is to pick a readable font and just stick with it. (Long ago, I committed myself to Times Roman when I saw that it remained tolerably readable reduced to 10 points. I will admit to using Ariel Narrow when writing documents with a limited number of pages, though. Back in the “old days,” before there were such things are word processing programs, you got whatever font was in the typewriter, and you liked it!)
So, to answer my questions, I went to Mr. Google and found a BBC article from 2010 that answered them. Regarding the creation of Comic Sans:
It was created in 1994 by Vincent Connare, who worked at Microsoft with the title of "typographic engineer".
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Connare was a fan of the graphic novel, and was inspired by the speech bubbles to create something simple and rounded, letters that might have been created by cutting with blunt scissors.
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And thus it became a global phenomenon, something that would inspire attention from Design Week magazine to the Wall St Journal. Connare later explained why it worked so well: "'Because it's sometimes better than Times New Roman, that's why."
And why do people hate it so much?
Partly because its ubiquity has led to such misuse (or at least to uses far beyond its original intentions). And partly because it is so irritably simple, so apparently written by a small child. Helvetica is everywhere and simple too, but it usually has the air of modern Swiss sophistication about it, or at least corporate authority. Comic Sans just smirks at you, and begs to be printed in multiple colours.
Comic Sans was ubiquitous? I had never noticed it anywhere. I guess that’s me being oblivious again.
I agree that Comic Sans looks a bit silly and inappropriate for any sort of document I might produce. I honestly can’t imagine there would ever be a situation where I would substitute Comic Sans for Times Roman, and I can’t imagine why the font’s creator would say that there might be such situations. But does the font really deserve that kind of hostility?
That’s all I’ve got tonight. Now, on to the tops!
Top Comments (January 17, 2018):
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Top Mojo (January 16, 2018):
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