Bad Font for a Bad Touch
If there was ever a font that was hated more by typophiles, it would be Comic Sans. Comic Sans is simply hideous. There are far better fonts for cartoons or pieces targeted at youth than Comic Sans. People who like Comic Sans are adding to the amassing litter polluting our visual landscape.Today, I was handed the flyer pictured here (click it for a larger version), and it may very well be the most inappropriate use of Comic Sans I've ever seen. How is that subject matter appropriate for a font like Comic Sans?
Hell, even Arial would be better.
UPDATE: I should add, however, that the default font for the body copy of this web site is Trebuchet, which was designed by the typographer of Comic Sans. I guess nobody's perfect.
7 Comments:
I think you should have added a NSFW tag to that flyer. Christ, man… I could be fired if somebody walked by and happened to see that font on my screen. Hell, I should be fired for having that fuckin' worthless font on my screen. Or at least spanked. Gingerly, with a damp paddle of sugar pine.
Non-serif fonts are created by demons from the abyss!
If Frutiger, Formata, Akzidenz Grotesk, Neutraface, Meta, and Spartan are wrong, I don't want to be right.
Then again, is there anything more beautiful than Requiem or Mrs Eaves?
Trebuchet is my personal favorite font.
Keep in mind that Trebuchet is designed solely for on-screen display. What makes it great for on-screen display (uniform stroke weight, large x-height, deep bowls) actually makes it too clunky for printed body copy. A good alternative to Trebuchet for print would be Meta, which shares a lot of Trebuchet's panache but has more contrast in the stroke weights, narrower lowercase letters, and far more features (a range of weights, small caps, dingbats, and ligatures).
But I'm not dissing Trebuchet. Along with Georgia and Verdana, Microsoft has some good fonts for web pages. In fact, the guy who designed the reviled Comic Sans has a lovely on-screen font called Magpie, which is long overdue for Microsoft to release in the wild.
Trebuchet on this blog looks fine on my mac, but on Windows Explorer (my work computer) it looks dreadful. It's terrible. It makes me sick every day. I hate it. It pisses me off.
Kelly, that's not the font, that's just you.
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