Binary Vision blog
Stop picking on Comic Sans
Posted 14 Oct 2011 by Paul N / @BinaryPJ
Following the usual designer hate campaign, Stephen Fry’s Planet Word has quietly replaced Comic Sans – which it had been using for its credits and captions. The great man himself was suitably *ashamed*:
In case you somehow hadn’t heard, Comic Sans is a hated font; hating it (and anyone who uses it) is a badge for people who ‘get’ design.
I know fonts don’t have feelings, but they do have a personality. And Comic Sans is the geeky awkward kid who eats lunch on his own (while the cool fonts flirt on the next table). Comic Sans is forever trying to be cheery.
See these example tweets – and there are zillions of them, some of them light-hearted:
(displayed
in comic sans – I just couldn’t resist)
The Ban Comic Sans FB page “believes in the sanctity of typography”. There’s even a Kill Comic Sans game.
I dislike mass hatings of any kind. They make me uncomfortable. So maybe it’s time to lay off Comic Sans, stop the bullying.
Epilogue: It’s thirty years in the future. The days of mass Comic Sans purges are long forgotten. Fonts have become so distressed and minimalist they can only be read by the most exquisite design visionaries. A Typography Thought Leader discovers a font called ‘Comic Sans’ in his mum’s old homework. It’s so of its day. So naïve. So chic. (So legible). And comic sans is über cool for the 2040s.