• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Why do people hate comic sans?

angrysoba

Philosophile
angrysoba
Joined
Dec 8, 2009
Messages
38,935
Location
Osaka, Japan
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?
 
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.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is the reason that a lot of people use it. Language teachers, for instance.

If it's overused, it's because it's one of the many few that have the "a" the way people write it. I think it's the only one that one can reasonably expect to be on a random computer.
 
I'm the exception, I like it. I have a tattoo using it on my foot..
 
mikado said:
I'm the exception, I like it......
Click to expand...

I like it too. It even appears on old drawings of mine. My wife uses it all the time. As a primary school teacher she prefers it because it is closer to how the children are expected to write than any other font.
 
I think "hate" is perhaps too strong a term.

"Mild derision", mebbe.

To be honest I generally go with whatever the default is for the editor I'm using. At least when using on-line editors like this one.

As I type this I'm thinking, "That doesn't really look all that bad. It's legible. That's what matters."

Mebbe time for a change?
 
Vsauce had the interesting theory that Comic Sans is the "Uncanny Valley" of fonts, stuck between a print font and handwriting.

For me it is that Comic Sans was designed for low resolution screens with no anti-aliasing, and in that regard it actually works very well. It just didn't age well and was overused.
 
MikeG said:
I like it too. It even appears on old drawings of mine. My wife uses it all the time. As a primary school teacher she prefers it because it is closer to how the children are expected to write than any other font.
Click to expand...

I also quite like it. At a Further Education college where I once worked it was the required font for printed teaching material as it was considered easier to read for those with dyslexia (of which there were a fair few).
 
1) It is overused, since it comes free for most people, and it was the first font people found that wasn't as formal as Times New Roman (default on Word/Office for many years) or stiff and boring like Arial. So people liked it, and used it.

2) It's not really a good font. It's a first-draft font that the designer clearly had not the time to finish properly. I give the benefit of the doubt to the designer, Vincent Connare, here that he knows what a good font makes. Without going into too much detail, it's the uneven kerning and uneven weight distribution that makes it bad. The font never made it into Bob, but the developers of Microsoft 3D Movie Maker liked it, so the font made it into the standard Windows font list.

3) It was intended for replacement in Microsoft Bob for the speech bubbles, which when Connare saw it used Times New Roman. Which is a badly used font, too, even worse than using Comic Sans for longer texts, as far as I am concerned. Connare let himself be inspired by comic book/graphic novel lettering, but he did not fully understand comic lettering. So today one should not even use it for comic lettering if one wants to appear professional. For instance, comic lettering is usually caps only, so professional comic book fonts use the shifted/non-shifted letters for all caps letters with slight variations, to emulate hand lettering, and fulfill certain typography rules, such as using an "I" with crossbars for the personal pronoun only, and just a vertical stroke for all other "i"s. Comic Sans includes standard upper/lower case letters.

4) There are way better fonts out there (some even free) that do not have these issues, but to the untrained persons look very similar to Comic Sans.

There you have it. It's a quick shot font not fully designed with very limited usefulness that by the powers that be was found in a position to be used for text it was massively bad for by people who had no idea why, while better alternatives are available. It also didn't help that Microsoft themselves didn't know and wasn't able to include guidelines into their products (not only for font usage).
 
Last edited:
GlennB said:
I also quite like it. At a Further Education college where I once worked it was the required font for printed teaching material as it was considered easier to read for those with dyslexia (of which there were a fair few).
Click to expand...

It is, by objective measures, not easier to read.

However, there was a study/publication by someone at Princeton (if I find the time, I'll try to find a link) who found that students retain information better if it was given to them in objectively hard to read fonts. So there might be a good reason for using it as teaching material.

ETA: Here it is: Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, Vaughan, Cognition, 2010, pdf /ETA

That said, one group that overused Comic Sans are people in teaching institutions. I went to a High School equivalent before PCs became standard, or Comic Sans was available, and in this time nearly all school publications were typed using the IBM Script type included for the IBM Selectric. So when Comic Sans came to be, school people decided it was a nice substitution. I never understood either decision.

There's also quite an irony that for most people Comic Sans appears to be, and is used because, handwritten. Except that it includes elements that people handwriting do not use. It's a standard typing font being crudely cuddyfied.
 
Last edited:
A very thorough explanation is in this article, Not My Type: Why the Web Hates Comic Sans
Why did people take so fondly to Comic Sans? Connare says it's simple: Because they like it.

"Comic Sans isn’t complicated, it isn’t sophisticated, it isn’t the same old text typeface like in a newspaper. It’s just fun — and that's why people like it," Connare told Fonts.com.
Click to expand...
 
Do you mean the comic Horatio Sanz? Well, he has had rather poor taste in movie roles, the "stoner of the year" thing was rather gauche, and he didn't last long on SNL, but he isn't worth hating. I think that maybe some people are jealous of him for losing so much weight.
 
paulhutch said:
A very thorough explanation is in this article, Not My Type: Why the Web Hates Comic Sans
Click to expand...

But that's only half the truth. The other half is that everyone and their mums have it readily available. MS could have chosen a dozen other fonts to be used in the Windows standard font list that would not have the problems Comic Sans has. And could have included more 'fun' fonts.

Typographic nerds have taken a dislike because its badness AND widespread use despite its badness.
 
elgarak said:
1) It is overused, since it comes free for most people, and it was the first font people found that wasn't as formal as Times New Roman (default on Word/Office for many years) or stiff and boring like Arial. So people liked it, and used it.

2) It's not really a good font. It's a first-draft font that the designer clearly had not the time to finish properly. I give the benefit of the doubt to the designer, Vincent Connare, here that he knows what a good font makes. Without going into too much detail, it's the uneven kerning and uneven weight distribution that makes it bad. The font never made it into Bob, but the developers of Microsoft 3D Movie Maker liked it, so the font made it into the standard Windows font list.

3) It was intended for replacement in Microsoft Bob for the speech bubbles, which when Connare saw it used Times New Roman. Which is a badly used font, too, even worse than using Comic Sans for longer texts, as far as I am concerned. Connare let himself be inspired by comic book/graphic novel lettering, but he did not fully understand comic lettering. So today one should not even use it for comic lettering if one wants to appear professional. For instance, comic lettering is usually caps only, so professional comic book fonts use the shifted/non-shifted letters for all caps letters with slight variations, to emulate hand lettering, and fulfill certain typography rules, such as using an "I" with crossbars for the personal pronoun only, and just a vertical stroke for all other "i"s. Comic Sans includes standard upper/lower case letters.

4) There are way better fonts out there (some even free) that do not have these issues, but to the untrained persons look very similar to Comic Sans.

There you have it. It's a quick shot font not fully designed with very limited usefulness that by the powers that be was found in a position to be used for text it was massively bad for by people who had no idea why, while better alternatives are available. It also didn't help that Microsoft themselves didn't know and wasn't able to include guidelines into their products (not only for font usage).
Click to expand...


You know quite a lot about fonts.
If I asked which commercial or non-commercial font best captures the 1920s or 1960s, would you have an opinion?
 
elgarak said:
But that's only half the truth. The other half is that everyone and their mums have it readily available. MS could have chosen a dozen other fonts to be used in the Windows standard font list that would not have the problems Comic Sans has. And could have included more 'fun' fonts.

Typographic nerds have taken a dislike because its badness AND widespread use despite its badness.
Click to expand...

Pretty much.

Besides it being terrible, it looks simplistic and childish. While that might work for a kid's birthday party invites, it has no place in anything even somewhat serious.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom