Why do people hate comic sans?

If you want a handwriting font, in particular that have things like a lowercase "a" that looks handwritten, here are some alternatives (I have fonted the names, but it probably won't show up on your machine):

Lucida Handwriting. Should be on your machine. Has been a standard font for Microsoft products for years. Looks somewhat formal, though, and not like real handwriting.

Dakota. Looks like real handwriting. Goes a bit into comic lettering. Should be free for personal use.

Crimefighter BB. Full comic lettering font. That means uppercase letters only. Free.

Apple Chalkboard. Essentially, a cleaned up Comic Sans. But you'll need a Mac to get it. (You may google and find downloads of fonts that look awfully similar that probably are not the real deal -- no proper license, and not a full set of characters -- but for personal use that should be OK.)

Comic Neue. It's a straightened out Comic Sans. Really straightened out, so much that it does not fully, but not quite totally, look like handwriting anymore. Should be free.

The following I have on my Mac, and I'm not sure of their license status. They either came with Mac, or some software package like Adobe CS.

Bradley Hand. Similar to Dakota. A bit cleaner.

Snell Roundhand. Very formal. Goes into calligraphy territory.

Zapfino. Ditto. Artsy.

Brush script. Another one that goes a bit into comic lettering (but still has both lower and uppercase letters).

Here's a sample of all of them:
picture.php
 
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I can't say I dislike Comic Sans; it's OK I suppose for short messages and emails. But as others have said, I wouldn't use it in a work or other formal environment. I just did some experimenting with different email programs I use, and what each one uses as the default font out of the box. I have email accounts with Comcast, Yahoo, MSN (now Outlook.com), Gmail, iCloud, and one or two others. Some common default fonts seem to be----------

Georgia, Tahoma, Verdana, Times New Roman, Arial, Courier, Helvetica and maybe a couple of others. I'm on a Mac, and the default in Pages is Helvetica.

Is there any consensus as to what font is the easiest to read for most people?
 
angrysoba said:
I often use this font if I want to type something that children might want to copy from because the a looks more like a handwritten one, and because it is without serifs, obviously.

But whenever I do, someone will pop up over my shoulder and say something like "Comic sans!!??!??!? Ewwwww!".

Why the hate?
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Pretentious snobbish stupidity, probably. Kind of the technical version of a "foodie." :rolleyes: I like the font, although I agree that it is best for less formal things.
 
Uncle Otto said:
[...]
Is there any consensus as to what font is the easiest to read for most people?
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Depends on what is being read.

Large chunks of text printed on paper are easier to read with a serif font. Times (Times New Roman), Garamond, Georgia, Caslon, Baskerville.

On screens, in particular on lower resolutions screens and smaller fonts, most people can read things better with a sans-serif font: Lucida Grande, Helvetica, Verdana, Myriad, Futura, Univers, Avenir, Arial. (Some people say Helvetica doesn't work well for screen reading and web publishing. I tend to disagree, though I would recommend the variant Helvetica Neue, which is optimized for that, and adds a lot of different weights [ultra light, light, thin, medium, condensed])

For signs with short messages that should be quick to recognize I would stick to a sans-serif. In fact, if in doubt and not doing anything fancy, my personal recommendations are Helvetica Neue Medium or Bold as starting points. If you don't have them, start with Arial Bold or Verdana Bold, but both look a little less clean than Helvetica (Neue).

Business letters can work with both sans-serif and serif, though I would stick to the less fancy sans-serif if you use them, like Helvetica, Arial, Verdana. Definitely not Futura.

For other projects, look at So You Need a Typeface. (Interesting to note here that one often-used font does not appear at all in this, which is Arial. Comic Sans is on there...)
 
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Just for clarity, a serif font is one that has little flare lines attached to the letters. Ex: Times New Roman. A sans-serif font is one that does not have those. Ex: Arial ("Sans" is French for "without".)
 
elgarak said:
Large chunks of text printed on paper are easier to read with a serif font. Times (Times New Roman), Garamond, Georgia, Caslon, Baskerville.
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I have heard this before, and have even told it to other people as fact, but I have more recently heard that the evidence for it is very shaky. Do you have any recent evidence to support it? I hope that it is true, for purely personal aesthetic reasons, but I'm having doubts.
 
Offhand, I can't think of any reason why it might be the case. In fact, my slight experience suggests that the serifs can often blunder close to adjoining letters, making the text harder to read.


Offhand, I can't think of any reason why it might be the case. In fact, my slight experience suggests that the serifs can often blunder close to adjoining letters, making the text harder to read.

Why do you find serif fonts aesthetically preferable? (Times New Roman is evil)
 
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Rat said:
I have heard this before, and have even told it to other people as fact, but I have more recently heard that the evidence for it is very shaky. Do you have any recent evidence to support it? I hope that it is true, for purely personal aesthetic reasons, but I'm having doubts.
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The first thing I could find online is here, though they only cite a book which cites a study in 1986:

In his book Cashvertising, Drew Eric Whitman cites a 1986 study of fonts (printed on paper) that found only 12 percent of participants effectively comprehended a paragraph set in sans-serif type versus 67 percent who were given a version set in serif typeface.

Those who read the sans-serif version said they had a tough time reading the text and "continually had to backtrack to regain comprehension."

In a test of three different fonts, two serifs (Garamond and Times New Roman) and one sans serif (Helvetica), he found 66 percent were able to comprehend Garamond; 31.5 percent Times New Roman, and 12.5 percent Helvetica (out of a total of 1,010,000 people surveyed).

The conclusion being that serif fonts are easier to read when it comes to fonts on paper. So, if you're sending out a sales letter or brochure in the mail, you probably want to use serif font (but, as mentioned in the first point, you could use sans-serif font for your headlines).
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I find the large difference surprising, in particular the drop-off between Garamond and Times New Roman. Then again, the claim is that they surveyed over a million people. If the citation is correct.

A little further down you find this for text on screen:

A 2002 study by the Software Usability and Research Laboratory concluded that:

The most legible fonts were Arial, Courier, and Verdana.
At 10-point size, participants preferred Verdana. Times New Roman was the least preferred.
At 12-point size, Arial was preferred and Times New Roman was the least preferred.
The preferred font overall was Verdana, and Times New Roman was the least preferred.
So here are your marching orders:

For easiest online reading, use Arial 12-point size and larger. If you're going smaller than 12 points, Verdana at 10 points is your best choice. If you're after a formal look, use the font "Georgia." And for older readers, use at least a 14-point font.
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It's not the best citation, but the one I could find fast'n'easy. If I find the time and encouragement, I might hunt down the proper papers.
 
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Rat said:
I have heard this before, and have even told it to other people as fact, but I have more recently heard that the evidence for it is very shaky. Do you have any recent evidence to support it? I hope that it is true, for purely personal aesthetic reasons, but I'm having doubts.
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I can say I have a book that I didn't read because it was typeset in single-spaced Helvetica. It was just impossible to read! I really tried, but I only got a few pages in.

(I know, this is not proof of anything, but I thought it was funny.)
 
I hate Papyrus more than life itself now. It's the new Comic Sans.

My favorite is Lucida Console. Takes me back to my mainframe days
 
Comparing the effects of text size and format on the readibility of computer-displayed Times New Roman and Arial text, Michael L. Bernard, Barbara S. Chaparro, Melissa M. Mills, Charles G. Halcomb

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 59, Issue 6, December 2003, Pages 823–835
Abstract

Times New Roman and Arial typefaces in 10- and 12-point, dot-matrix and anti-aliased format conditions were compared for readability (accuracy, reading speed, and accuracy/reading speed), as well as perceptions of typeface legibility, sharpness, ease of reading, and general preference. In assessing readability, the 10-point anti-aliased Arial typeface was read slower than the other type conditions. Examining perceptions of typeface legibility, sharpness, and ease of reading detected significant effects for typeface, size, and format. Overall, the 12-point dot-matrix Arial typeface was preferred to the other typefaces. Recommendations for appropriate typeface combinations for computer-displayed text are discussed.





e-book readability, comprehensibility and satisfaction by Yi, Wooyong; Park, Eunil; Cho, Kwangsu Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on ubiquitous information management and communication, 02/2011

Abstract
The style of text, including number of columns, line spacing, typeface, and font-size, may affect e-book readers' understanding, readability and satisfaction. Along with the recent appearances of e-book devices such as Amazon's Kindle, Apple iBooks, and Barns & Nobles' Nook, user experiences reading with e-books is considered critical. In this study, we investigated the issues in terms of readability, comprehensibility, and satisfaction by systematically measuring two major typographical factors: number of columns and line spacing. The study showed that these two independent variables are critical for e-book experiences from these three key aspects. Finally, the implications of this research are discussed.




A letter visual-similarity matrix for Latin-based alphabets by Simpson, Ian C; Mousikou, Petroula; Montoy, Juan Manuel; Defior, Sylvia Behavior Research Methods, 06/2013, Volume 45, Issue 2

Abstract

Indicators of letter visual similarity have been used for controlling the design of empirical and neuropsychological studies and for rigorously determining the factors that underlie reading ability and literacy acquisition. Additionally, these letter similarity/confusability matrices have been useful for studies examining more general aspects of human cognition, such as perception. Despite many letter visual-similarity matrices being available, they all have two serious limitations if they are to be used by researchers in the reading domain: (1) They have been constructed using atypical reading data obtained from speeded reading-aloud tasks and/or under degraded presentation conditions; (2) they only include letters from the English alphabet. Although some letter visual-similarity matrices have been constructed using data gathered from normal reading conditions, these either are based on old fonts, which may not resemble the letters found in modern print, or were never published. For the first time, this article presents a comprehensive letter visual-similarity/confusability matrix that has been constructed based on untimed responses to clearly presented upper- and lowercase letters that are present in many languages that use Latin-based alphabets, including Catalan, Dutch, English, French, Galician, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Such a matrix will be useful for researchers interested in the processes underpinning reading and literacy acquisition.

 
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Rat said:
I have heard this before, and have even told it to other people as fact, but I have more recently heard that the evidence for it is very shaky. Do you have any recent evidence to support it? I hope that it is true, for purely personal aesthetic reasons, but I'm having doubts.
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I believe one reason serif might be a bit better is that the serifs give you clues about letters if you're only focusing on the top or bottom half of the text lines.

Here is one analysis:

http://alexpoole.info/blog/which-are-more-legible-serif-or-sans-serif-typefaces/

~~ Paul
 
GlennB said:
Why do you find serif fonts aesthetically preferable? (Times New Roman is evil)
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Because sans serif fonts for running text look cheap, tawdry, and gimmicky now. Perhaps I've been staring at crappy fonts on my monitor too long.

They are particularly bad in technical books if the designer insists on using them for math, too. And if not, then the sans serif text clashes with the math. And they are horrible in technical art, unless you don't want to be able to tell the 0 from O, the I from the 1 or |, and so forth. Of course, there are some newer sans serif fonts that fix this problem.

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Because sans serif fonts for running text look cheap, tawdry, and gimmicky now. Perhaps I've been staring at crappy fonts on my monitor too long.

They are particularly bad in technical books if the designer insists on using them for math, too. And if not, then the sans serif text clashes with the math. And they are horrible in technical art, unless you don't want to be able to tell the 0 from O, the I from the 1 or |, and so forth. Of course, there are some newer sans serif fonts that fix this problem.

~~ Paul
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Lol. I recently had to reset someone's password. I set it to something like "!1lIlI|Il¦i!1l" and printed it off for them in sans-serif. They had annoyed me.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
You're a nasty man, Mr. Rat.

~~ Paul
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If I give you a reasonably secure password, write it down for you, and then find that you've reset it to something that consists of four lower-case letters so that you can remember it more easily, you will have to live with the consequences. And in no way will this encourage the user to once again reset it to something insecure.
 
Our new company policy expanded the password requirements to change it every three months, with a minimum of 15 characters, at least one upper-case character, at least one lower-case character, at least one special character, no three repeated characters, and not equal to any of the last 10 passwords used.

Thus ensuring that one has to write down the password somewhere in order to remember it.
 
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