Why comic sans

I had been given a beta version of Microsoft Bob, a comic software package designed primarily for young users. The package featured a dog called Rover, with message balloons set in Times New Roman—a system font oddly unsuited to the comic context.

Connare created the font in three days to meet the deadline of the release of the software. It was inspired by comic book lettering of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns and has a handwritten, playful, and quirky look. Currently, it ships with both Windows and Mac OS. Released with the first affordable personal computer, Comic Sans found an audience in anyone who was tired of the other overly formal options and wanted to exercise their amateur design skills.

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.

Then, you would post them up in your neighborhood; and — like a caveman — you would pick up a phone, call the newspaper, and place an ad to help find your kitten.

But now that you had Windows 95, a personal computer, and a printer, you could use Word to make your lost kitten poster, and print it out at home.

And, wow! You could use any font you wanted. So, guess what font makes you think about your lost kitten? This is a monumental moment in history — right up there with the invention of printing — for common people to suddenly have the power to typeset and print documents. No big deal for awhile: some people got to enjoy making their own Christmas cards, birthday party invitations, etc.

But then, gradually, over the next 10 years or so, the internet got more and more popular. Now, any one person could write a message that could potentially be read by millions, in Comic Sans.

This actually happened when Cleveland Caveliers owner, Dan Gilbert wrote a letter regarding the dramatic departure of LeBron James, in Comic Sans — resulting in a media storm over the poor font choice. But where did all of this hatred come from? This made the production of high quality print design much cheaper, and much more viable for businesses to spend money on.

So, with the increased demand for Graphic Design services, Design schools started churning out graduates at an unprecedented pace. Terrible font choices, poor kerning, haphazard color choices, and stupid concepts suddenly assault your eyes once you learn about design principles, color theory, typography, and concept development. This suggests that humans are good at determining when a typeface suits a given context. These qualities are cued by multiple subtle traits of the design. For instance, serif fonts have tiny extenders on the ends of letters, which lends them a more refined and elegant quality to the average eye.

Consequently, " more professional documents tend to use serif fonts," Chaparro said. San serif fonts, on the other hand, don't have these elegant extenders , and tend to come across as more casual. Asked why we read these subtle cues the way we do, Chaparro said that's hard to know for sure. But, "from the typewriter days, there is a history of serif fonts being used for business documents," she said. Perhaps, over time we have come to link these visual cues to formal writing.

One thing is clear to typographers: "Comic Sans is a sans serif typeface — designed to be informal, casual and used for that kind of material — like a comic ," Chaparro said. And this, it seems, is where the problem lies for most people who despise its goofy characters.

After the invention of Comic Sans, people started to use it in contexts that it wasn't intended for — such as, in formal documents — giving it a disjointed quality that some found jarring.