COLUMN: I don’t hate you, Comic Sans
Long before I came to college and long before I was comfortable calling myself a designer, I learned what for many is the first rule of graphic design: "Thou shalt not use Comic Sans."
It’s a valid rule. The font sticks out on any page like a sore thumb, and typically does not do your design any favors.
Ask anyone who knows anything about fonts which one they hate most and you’ll hear them name Papyrus, Brush Script and Lucida Handwriting. But perhaps more often than any of these, you’ll hear them say they hate Comic Sans.
I don’t hate you, Comic Sans.
No, you are not a beautiful classic serif like Caslon, which was created hundreds of years ago, or a modern geometric sans serif like one of my personal favorites, Futura.
There are hundreds of fonts deemed more “acceptable," yet I do not hate you, nor do I believe that you deserve the loathing you have received for over two decades.
Designed by Vincent Connare in 1994, you were created with a specific purpose. At the time, Microsoft was unleashing a new software package called “Microsoft Bob,” which was intended to be a user-friendly finance manager and word processor. A friendly cartoon dog represented “Bob,” as well as the Times New Roman typeface.
Knowing this software needed a more friendly touch than a grade-school paper set in 12 pt Times New Roman, Connare set out to design you, a font heavily influenced by the popular graphic novels "The Dark Knight Returns" and "Watchmen."You were modeled off of the text in comic books — a purpose many seem to forget when they choose you from the font drop down menu.
In the end, you were not used for Microsoft’s attempted user-friendly software, and the program was a bust. You were later adopted for Microsoft Movie Maker, which became a hit. As Simon Garfield puts it in his book, "Just My Type,"“the typeface intended only as a solution to a problem took off.”
Thanks to Steve Jobs’ unprecedented act of including multiple typefaces on his operating systems, Windows followed suit and in Windows 95, you, Comic Sans, were included. Thus, you entered into the public consciousness.
Since then you have appeared on class assignment sheets, defibrillator signage, sex offender parole flyers and many other severely misinformed and just flat-out wrong places.
Comic Sans, I want to tell you that this is not your fault. Society has taken you, like many other items of its affection, and it has abused and used you in ways you were never intended for. You were herded into the ranks of the shunned, by the sheep themselves, and distorted from something fun into something only to be made fun of.
You will never be my favorite font, and I promise you won’t appear again in Central Michigan Life this semester. However, Comic Sans, I can say this with confidence: I do not hate you.
