What makes comic sans bad

JavaScript is disabled in your browser. To get the best user experience on our website you should enable it Comic Sans has a round, unelegant, and somewhat flamboyant style, which makes it look cartoonish and non-serious looking. So is this absolutist, general advice against using Comic Sans in your work, actually good advice?

No, absolutist, black and white statements are rarely rooted in good thinking. For example, if someone sends an email or writes a document using it," said Chaparro, "it results in a mismatch — an informal, childlike, 'funny' typeface for a potentially serious topic. Connare has a theory about why that occurred. In the s, when home computers started becoming the norm, they gave people a sense of agency that they hadn't had before.

Suddenly, anyone with access to a computer could choose from a variety of fonts with which to personalize their documents. The fact that it was being used outside of its rather limited purpose — that became obnoxious to people who knew better. Mackiewicz also thinks that because of the ubiquitous and informal use of Comic Sans, it became associated with other bad design elements, "like centered types, or all caps, or underlining" — features that make typographers' skin crawl.

As others took up the cause against Comic Sans, it grew into its reputation as the pariah of the typography world — and marked those who used it as lacking in taste.

Where does this leave the beleaguered — but eternally cheery — typeface and its maker? These days Connare lives in the French countryside, where he grows olive trees and practices calligraphy in his spare time — not overly concerned about people's opinions of him, or his font.

But he said that when he meets people and talks about Comic Sans, surprisingly, many confess to him that they are fans. So, for all the offense it has caused, perhaps it has a secret following. The ironic thing about this distinction is that Comic Sans is actually influenced from a drawing tool: a round, felt-tipped pen or marker; but, the stroke of this tool is unmodulated.

Meanwhile, the letterforms of Helvetica are rationalized from predecessors, without apparent influence of a drawing tool. This mismanagement of visual weight is the main issue that makes reading Comic Sans an unpleasant experience. Letters or blocks of text that are free from disproportionately light or heavy spots allow the letterforms themselves to shine through and be read easily. This example shows how a block of text set in Helvetica differs in texture from a block of text set in Comic Sans.

First, notice the general variation of lightness and darkness in the lines of type. The Helvetica is a more uniform grey, while the Comic Sans varies widely, with some very dark spots scattered throughout the body of text.

When compared to Garamond and Helvetica, we can get some idea of why. Helvetica maintains balance by compensating for its absence of stroke modulation by having a larger eye and a smaller aperture. The letterfit of Helvetica allows for it to inherently have decent kerning tables. So, the typographic fundamentals of Comic Sans are very poor as used in high-resolution situations, but Comic Sans was never intended to be used in this manner, and that is part of why its considered such a bad font.

Comic Sans was originally designed to be used in the talk bubbles of a program called Microsoft Bob. Once the font was in the hands of Windows 95 users, there was no telling how people would use it.

Now, it was going to be printed out on bake sale flyers, birthday party invitations, and even business cards. Anti-aliasing is the technology that makes fonts looks smooth on-screen. So, the story of Comic Sans is not that of a really terrible font, but rather of a mediocre font, used incorrectly on a massive scale. Windows 95 was the first operating system to really hit it big. Just as computers were starting to pop up in nearly every home in America, Windows 95 was finding itself installed on all of those computers, and with it, the font Comic Sans.

So now, nearly every man, woman, child, and bake sale organizer find themselves armed with publishing power unlike civilization had ever seen; and few of them really had any design sense. It used to be that if you lost your kitten, and wanted to make a poster, probably the most efficient way to make a flyer would be to draw one up with magic marker, cut out a picture of the cat, and go down to the nearest supermarket to make copies of it at 15 cents apiece.