Why does comic sans

How did schools ever advertise their Christmas fairs without it? Has a homemade birthday card ever looked so friendly written in anything else? Have type lovers ever found anything they loathe as much?

If you wrote these questions in Comic Sans you'd have something that was warm, inoffensive and rather unsuitable, a typeface that's gone wrong.

And you'd also have something guaranteed to provoke a howl of protest. Comic Sans is unique: used the world over, it's a typeface that doesn't really want to be type. It looks homely and handwritten, something perfect for things we deem to be fun and liberating.

Great for the awnings of toyshops, less good on news websites or on gravestones and the sides of ambulances. Last year it stuck out like an unfunny joke in Time magazine and Adidas adverts, and even the BBC wasn't immune, choosing the font to promote its Composers of the Year during the Proms. What can be done? Holly and David Combs, the husband and wife cottage industry behind bancomicsans.

Some of what the Combses have to say is tongue-in-cheek, but it is hard to disagree with their claims that type - used well or badly - has the ability to express meaning far beyond the basic words it clothes.

But why, more than any other font, has Comic Sans inspired so much revulsion? Partly because its ubiquity has led to such misuse or at least to uses far beyond its original intentions. And partly because it is so irritably simple, so apparently written by a small child. Helvetica is everywhere and simple too, but it usually has the air of modern Swiss sophistication about it, or at least corporate authority.

Comic Sans just smirks at you, and begs to be printed in multiple colours. But they have their similarities as well. Comic Sans also has an unmodulated stroke. Before printing was available in the West, scribes lettered Bibles beautifully and patiently by hand, using a flat-tipped pen, held at a fixed angle, which influenced the form of those letters — resulting in a modulated stroke. The forms of most sans-serif fonts are not influenced by drawing tools.

For example, notice how the stroke on Helvetica gets thinner where the shoulder meets the stem on this letter n. This helps to give the letter a more even visual weight. Notice how Comic Sans is not this way. 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. Awesome PC Accessories. Best Linux Laptops. Best Gaming Monitors. Best iPads.

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