Fonts! FONTS!
on December 17, 2020 at 1:01 amChapter: Tales Told out of School
Characters: Becky MacIntyre, Joyce Brown
Location: Ross and Becky's apartment
This originally published in October of 2008, which is the month after I’d proposed to Maggie! So, uh, we’re hitting up some Personal Experience With Wedding Planning content.
And Becky, you’re canceled!
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I have never understood people’s hatred for comic sans. It even comes up in Shortpacked!
It’s so distinctively overused, like the Wilhelm scream or that kind of thing
whereas Times New Roman or Arial are bland enough to be everywhere but simultaneously indistinguishable from any other standardish serif or sans serif typeface
This is the reason I hear most often, in regard to Comic Sans. Far more than I used to hear people complain about Helvetica being overused…
Ah, reminds me of the time when I did some typographic rendition programming job and the specs called for Arial, something which is not really trivial to do in actual typographically serious workflows. Imagine my relief when the provided sample pages clearly showed that “Arial” was just gutterspeak for “Helvetica” (things like G and t are different in very obvious manners).
I remember when comic sans was the most widely used font among kids/preteens, then adults learned about it and started using it in school handouts and fliers for church youth groups and other such “what’s up fellow kids?” type stuff that still produces a knee-jerk reaction to this day.
I don’t understand the hate for it either. Or the similar hate for Papyrus.
One of the other issues with Comic Sans was that people used it for inappropriate things.
Comic sans is for fun, light-hearted things that aren’t to be taken seriously. And even then, it’s only one of several good fonts for that purpose. So long as it is used only occasionally and for that sort of thing, I rather like it.
On the way up to the college I went to for undergrad, we’d always pass by this pizza place with the WORST logo I had ever seen. Every word on it was in a wildly different font, with different sizing and emphasis. (Even the shades of red for the two words that used it – which, by the way, it alternated red and black – were slightly different.) The spacing between words was inconsistent. It was awful. And I swear, one of the words was in Comic Sans, sandwiched between two wildly different fonts and also oddly stuck on a gray background nothing else in the logo used.
I have not been up that way in five years, but I still remembered that pizzeria enough to Google it and see that its sign was in fact as bad as I remembered. Frankly, it’s worse. The choice to use Comic Sans was far from the worst thing about the logo, but the choice to use Comic Sans as one of four different fonts? Definitely indicative of the typesetting ~whimsy~ I associate with the font in general.
(Yes this was mostly an excuse to roast a random pizzeria for its typesetting sins. I was thinking about Comic Sans and just filled with the memory, and attendant rage.)
ah, that also… I keep forgetting bc I feel like EVERY “distinctive” typeface is misused
It’s a meme that got out of control. Someone posted a blog once about how much they hate (or love) Comic Sans (I’ve never read it and never felt the need to, which is why I don’t really ‘get’ the joke). However, they were so passionate about it that lots of people mocked it in a variety of ways and, ultimately, it became a meme and the assumption grew that Comic Sans was a bad font just because everyone was making memes about it.
Replace the final panel with Garfield being thrown out the window (they have the same hair color, it’s close enough).
you gotta use papyrus
Comic Sans is to typography humor what airline food is to standup comedy at this point, honestly.
But where was it in 2008?
Sans means without, right. So if it is named Comic Sans it is the font without humor. It’s right there in the name
Comic Sans is good actually
It’s excellent, especially for comics. It scales smoothly when resized and rearranged for different balloons, is clear and easy to read. There is literally nothing wrong with it… except some snobby hipster types who see it everywhere consider it bad just BECAUSE they see it everywhere. As hipster logic goes, the more obscure and rare something is, the better it is.
Unfortunately, when the main purpose of a font is to be READABLE, being wildly non-standard isn’t always a good thing.
You see some webcomics sometimes where they’ve switched to some weird-ass font to represent some non-human’s weird-sounding speech, but they’ve picked a font that looks mostly legible at their 400% WIP page they themselves are working on, but once the page is struck to web-viewing size, the text is unreadable.
Ah, the Rodney Dangerfield of all fonts.
Except everybody liked Rodney Dangerfield.
…or was that a “I get no respect” joke?
Ah! The long-forgotten “Is Comic Sans’ a good font?” meme! That really dates this strip pretty well!
What I heard is that it’s amateurish, designed by someone who didn’t know the “rules” of typesetting, and to professionals, its design flaws stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.
Honestly, if its kerning is okay, and each letter is recognizable, and distinct from any other, (I’m looking at you, lower-case L and upper case I), it’s okay, as far as I’m concerned.
But, apparently for those who are experts in the field, the acceptance of Comic Sans is the equivalent of finding out the $5,000 painting in the gallery, that sold for WAY more than yours was, was done by some kid on a lark.
Comic Sans is retro-chic.
Joyce is gonna have a bad time.
I’m sorry