
What is wrong with Comic Sans? - papaf
https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/38226/what-is-wrong-with-comic-sans
======
loup-vaillant
This looks like a status issue _again_.

Comic Sans is an informal-looking font, which means low status. Seeing a high-
status researcher using it in front of a relatively high-status audience
speaking about a serious, high-status topic… is jarring for many people. On a
similar note, I know of a guy who often illustrates his very serious
philosophical points with Japanese anime references.

Many people don't like such status dissonance. They literally cringe. I don't,
and I suspect Simon P.J. doesn't either. And I don't see why we should: we're
the kind of people who care more about the structure of an argument than the
clothes the speaker is wearing. This is also apparent in His talk, "How to
Write a Great Research Paper"[1, 2]. His counsel is all about readability and
engagement, never about sounding serious or important.

[1]:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3dkRsTqdDA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3dkRsTqdDA)

[2]: [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/simonpj/papers...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/writing-a-paper-slides.pdf)

\---

As a last note, I have seen suggested here, and in the Stack Overflow thread,
that there are much better fonts out there (Comic Neue seems to be the most
popular alternative). But let's imagine for a second that SPJ used Comic Neue
instead of Comic Sans. Would that make people stop asking why he's using this
font?

I don't think so.

~~~
empressplay
I don't think it's a matter of status so much as an issue of "typeface
credibility" \-- Comic Sans says "what's written in this font shouldn't be
taken seriously." Serif fonts are on the "serious" end of the credibility
spectrum, sans fonts are in the centre, and then "fun" fonts like CS occupy
the "not serious" end.

This isn't a bad thing -- the pre-association people have for different
classes of fonts make it easier to convey messages in branding and marketing.
It makes us distinguish between stories in newspapers and magazines (which we
should remember) from frivolity that we could easily forget. With fonts, the
medium is a significant part of the message.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Serif fonts aren't more credible than San serif fonts. Serif fonts are great
for lots of paragraph based text, san serif fonts are better for titles and
shorter passages...and also code.

Fun fonts can be serif or sans, and are generally more artistic and ad
oriented.

~~~
Shorel
On screens you are right.

But on paper, with much higher resolution, serif looks more serious.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Sans often appears on signage, especially in Europe, where it works very well.

------
klunger
The problem is that fonts are used to signify tone.

When I see Comic Sans, the tone I read the text in is "cartoon dog." Although
this particular interpretation may be just me, I believe many people have
similarly toned readings (it comes down to cultural interpretation of
symbols...). So, it is jarring and inappropriate for many people to see Comic
Sans, in certain contexts.

There are many equally legible fonts out there which do not signal "cartoon
dog" or similar. So, yes, you can _can_ present your research in the voice of
a cartoon dog. But, it is pretty tone deaf.

~~~
jarcane
I think tone is the correct argument against it.

It is essentially kitsch, in font form, and because of that it's going to
devalue the information it presents in many contexts, and is thus only likely
to go unregarded in contexts where kitsch is basically expected.

I recently received a letter from the Finnish employment department demanding
more documentation of an alleged business interest. This is a government
official making a request that potentially threatens my livelihood.

In Comic Sans.

As an emotive impact, it was very much like your "cartoon dog". Imagine
getting a Garfield condolence card as a layoff notice, or seeing a :) smilie
at the end of a foreclosure notice. It seems to immediately impart a lack of
respect for the gravity of the situation.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Its entirely subjective. I for instance can't recognize comic sans or any
other font than Courier by sight. So for me it carries no insult.

So again, what's wrong with that font? Nothing, intrinsically. Its all in the
'internet meme' part that says its passé. Quit subscribing to that (or like
me, never emotionally invest in any silly meme) and the issue disappears.

~~~
jarcane
All aesthetics are subjective, because they are based primarily on associative
memory.

That's not an argument against their value, that's merely a refusal to
acknowledge it.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Those that assert 'Comic Sans is objectionable' are arguable the ones refusing
to acknowledge how subjective it is, right?

Clearly its understood that aesthetics are based on associations. I'm here to
assert: a significant fraction of the population (non-designers?) have no
associations one way or the other.

------
aamar
Nearly all of the answers give the same answer: that Comic Sans is a fine
typeface that is only inappropriate (sometimes) because it sets an
inappropriate tone.

I don't believe that's the main problem at all. The problem is aesthetic[1].
Some letterforms are inherently unbalanced and create tension, notably the
wild angles in the m, the serif in the s, and the tipping-over T. The wobbles
in the I, n, and h distract as well. Beyond that, there are the subtler issues
of different inclination on the verticals (j, t, l, h) and bad kerning for
various character pairs.

If Comic Sans were truly convincing as handwritten font, it would probably be
better; on the plus side it is sufficiently far from that that it avoids
falling in the very bottom of a handwriting uncanny valley.

Now aesthetics doesn't necessarily impede legibility per se, but beauty and
visual harmony are generally enjoyable, and use of Comic Sans eschews it.
Compare it to the much better Comic Neue[2].

[1] example: [http://kinkeaddesigns.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/03/Comic-S...](http://kinkeaddesigns.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/03/Comic-Sans-Probs.jpg)

[2] [http://comicneue.com/](http://comicneue.com/)

~~~
boomlinde
Let's pretend for a minute that beauty isn't inherently subjective. Is beauty
and visual harmony always a desired property?

~~~
fennecfoxen
When it comes to the process of getting information into someone's brain
through the use of written language, yes, it's _generally_ quite desirable not
to make the brain work too hard to process the writing, or to otherwise
distract it. (There are of course a few special-purpose exceptional cases.)

~~~
boomlinde
I am glad that someone agrees.

------
Muzzaf
[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)

> John Tukey almost always dressed very casually. He would go into an
> important office and it would take a long time before the other fellow
> realized that this is a first-class man and he had better listen. For a long
> time John has had to overcome this kind of hostility. It's wasted effort! I
> didn't say you should conform; I said ``The appearance of conforming gets
> you a long way.'' If you chose to assert your ego in any number of ways, ``I
> am going to do it my way,'' you pay a small steady price throughout the
> whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up
> to an enormous amount of needless trouble.

~~~
loup-vaillant
On the other hand, thanks to people like John Tukey, technical folks can now
spare the suit and still be taken seriously. The price he paid may have been
worth the benefit we now have.

~~~
Muzzaf
The day when the entire arXiv is re-typeset in Comic Sans cannot come soon
enough. Rebels like Peyton-Jones are truly fighting the good fight.

~~~
ZenoArrow
That's not the same thing. The argument is for choice, not replacement. A more
appropriate example would be a single arXiv article written in Comic Sans
without detracting from the message.

As for the wider debate, people have pointed out that it's a matter of form
vs. function, but there's another aspect, which is intention. If you do not
intend to convey any extra information by using Comic Sans, then discussing
the font choice is irrelevant. It's only when Comic Sans is used to signify
something that the whole form vs. function argument comes into play.

I, for one, am glad that there is a popular font that pisses experts off,
Comic Sans is the punk rock of the font world, I hope others will make an
impact.

------
nraynaud
Funny quip at the boxed wine, since good winemakers have started selling their
stuff in BIB in the last 15 years in France. It shows a bit the lack of
perspective of some people.

They complain about comic sans to show membership to a group. Like cracking a
Star Trek joke.

~~~
Theodores
If fonts were rock bands then Comic Sans would be something like one of those
'X-factor' talent show boy-bands, i.e. popular with the masses yet utterly
despised by 'proper musicians' for not making 'real music'.

To fit into the 'I am a designer that cannot use anything other than Photoshop
club' you have to mock comic sans in all of its uses and show utter disgust at
what is a truly popular font. It is as easy to do as mocking the talent show
boy bands. On the 'designer' learning curve it is up there with replacing all
text with lorem ipsum.

Despite what people say in general Comic Sans is used quite appropriately,
particularly by those that are not designers. If you want people to go to the
village fete then a 'designed' flyer is not what you want, something banged
out in Word with Comic Sans actually conveys the message pretty well.

------
sambeau
_Without knowing anything about this guy, it seems like he 'd be the kind of
person who'd wear socks under his Crocs because it's comfortable and he
doesn't care._

Hahaha. When I knew Simon Peyton Jones he didn't wear shoes at all—just bare
feet—in Glasgow—one of the coldest, wettest cities in the UK.

~~~
AndrewGreen
Maybe he got more hardcore over time. I was (one of) his undergrads at UCL
when he was a newly minted professor and I think he was one of the socks-with-
sandals crew (vs sandals without, and those who wore regular shoes).

------
TeMPOraL
I'd say the problem is that Comic Sans is already an established meme.
Everyone who knows what Comic Sans is already knows that it's bad, and a
design smell, and you absolutely positively should never ever use it for
anything. Of course, the little know secret that was just brought up here is
that no one really knows why. It doesn't matter to them. There are some good
reasons to restrain yourself from using that font in some situations, but
current attitude towards Comic Sans is pure fashion.

It's the exact same situation as programmers have with goto - there's this
widely established meme of "goto considered harmful" that most have heard
somewhere, but have no clue why it's so except that it is. Only few of us know
_why_ using goto leads to bad consequences (and what those consequences are);
even fewer could name situations where goto _is_ a right tool for the job. For
the rest, it's fashion.

------
hysan
As someone who has read up on typography specifically to pick better fonts for
the worksheets I give to my students (teaching English in a foreign country),
Comic Sans is actually a very good font to use. As a handwritten style font,
it was designed specifically for legibility. The characters and easy to
distinguish and it's actually a good font choice for dyslexic people.

Since the topic of the presentation is in the field of education, I think that
Comic Sans (and other similar readable fonts - Comic Neue, Open Dyslexic) is a
very appropriate choice. It shows that the presenter is cognizant of getting
information across efficiently. And for all those detractors, I'd like to ask
them, "Do you ever use Comic Sans (or similar fonts) in your classes? If not,
why not?"

------
thenduks
Seems to me that the real/only reason for SPJ not to use Comic Sans is that
using it distracts people (in general, since he notes that he gets lots of
comments about it, I'm not personally distracted by it) from what he's saying.

So it might make sense to use a font that goes pretty much unnoticed, to put
the focus on the content of the talk. Then again, maybe he is thinking more
along the lines of "if my font choice is the most important thing to you, feel
free to leave/not watch this talk."

I feel like, if I were advocating something (FP, Haskell, new ways of teaching
computer science, or whatever), I would want to do everything I could to keep
the discussion on-topic.

------
MileyCyrax
>I frequently see remarks like 'Simon Peyton-Jones, great talk about Haskell
but why did he use Comic Sans?' but nobody's ever been able to tell me what is
wrong with it. It's a nice legible font, I like it. So until somebody explains
to me ...

Of all the little things that annoy me about Comic Sans, this is by far the
worst.

Suppose I showed some of my Haskell code to a group of people and they all
told me that every Haskell expert says I should keep my IO functions as
minimal and separate as I can. I ask them why, and they assure me again that
Simon Peyton-Jones himself is adamant about this, but none of them seem to be
able to put an explanation into words.

I wouldn't just dismiss them with "it works fine for me" and not even bother
to Google something like "haskell separate impure code". So why do so many
people do that when the advice is coming from designers instead of engineers?

~~~
thenduks
I think your logic is flawed a bit here. A _lot_ of people absolutely will
dismiss suggestions like "keep your IO functions minimal/separate" and "you
should test your code" and etc essentially saying "it works fine for me."

But in general I agree with you. "Until somebody explains to me... a rational
reason..." \- I will explain it: It is detracting (however unfortunate that
may be) from your message/content.

------
alricb
SPJ isn't a developer, or at least not mainly a developer. He's a computer
science researcher, one of the top researchers of his generation in his field.
Among his peers, what counts are the contributions you make, not what shoes
you wear or what font you use. Some researchers will make their presentations
look nice because they care about aesthetics, but as long as the meat is there
and the slides are readable, nobody really minds odd-looking fonts.

In a way, this is a bit like the encounter of a Canadian and a Scottish
officer on South Beveland (Netherlands) in October 1944.

> In the early hours of the 29th I was out with a unit of carriers,
> maintaining a standing patrol on the left flank of the battalion. In order
> to complete our patrol, we utilized some Dutch bicycles to patrol down a
> dyke to the bank of of the West Scheldt. All our men were desperately tired
> and in a filthy, wet, muddy condition. On our way we were terribly surprised
> to find a party of what were obviously Allied troops landing in a small
> boat. Then forth from one of the boat onto the shore stepped what seemed to
> me to be the finest soldier I had ever seen in my life, a fine figure of a
> Scottish gentleman, carrying the shepherd's crook affected by some senior
> Scottish officers in place of a cane or a swagger stick. He had a small pack
> neatly adjusted on his back. (I had absolutely no idea where mine was and
> couldn't care less.) His gas cape was neatly rolled. (I had last sen mine
> somewhere around Eterville.) He had his pistol in a neatly blancoed web
> holster. (I had mine in my hip pocket.) He had a neatly kept map case. (I
> had mine stuck in my breast pocket.) He was a Colonel and I was a Captain.
> His boots were neatly polished and I was wearing turned-down rubber boots. I
> did manage to salute, although I think it must have been haphazard. He
> politely enquired if we were Canadians. (Although who else could have looked
> as we did?) I assured his we were. He asked if I could direct him to
> battalion headquarters. I did better than that. I escorted him to battalion
> headquarters. I was taking no chances on losing such a beautiful specimen to
> the German Army. *

*: D. G. Godspeed, Battle Royal (Toronto 1962), 509. (cited in Terry Copp, The Brigade (Mechanicsburg, PA 2007), 160.)

------
flurdy
I used to use Comic Sans all over the place, even though I knew it was frowned
upon. I did it mostly to piss off my designer friends and colleagues, although
probably initially just because I liked it when back then when there was not
much choice.

I don't use it anymore as I can't be bothered to annoy people on purpose
anymore, and nowadays there is not much effort needed to find a nice google
font etc.

Although I do still like to argue about tabs-spaces, curly brackets,
pragmatic-mathematic etc.

------
Steko
38 comments and no McSweeny's link?

[http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-
asshole](http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole)

 _Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m
stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for
a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best
thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg..._

------
Pxtl
The problem with comic sans is the associations it has, not the font itself.

Comic sans is the preferred font of passive-aggressive clip-art smattered
notes that use "quotes" for "emphasis" to explain that men of the dorm "must"
rinse their shavings down the drain or that this is America and we speak
"English".

