Don't Like - Comic Sans Hate

No typeface, save for Papyrus, is as derided as Comic Sans. It’s been this way forever, like one of those eternal truths of the modern age. If you listen to designers talk about the font you’d think it was the greatest sin ever perpetrated against humanity. The level of vitriol is astounding. It all owes to the fact that Comic Sans is most associated with grade school flyers made by first-grade teachers who aren’t familiar with the Vignelli Canon or Adobe Indesign. So when you talk about Comic Sans with (most) designers they get up in arms as a matter of instinctual protest. But isn’t that kind of embarrassing for them? Could you imagine a professional basketball player getting pissed off about bad ball movement in a game of pickup at the park? Or what about a Michelin starred chef losing their mind about the way a college student makes a box of mac and cheese? You’d tell them to be for real. But this low level of common sense is not out of reach for many designers I’ve worked with. That’s really too bad because instead of getting riled up over this silly typeface they could be trying to have fun with it the way Cory Arcangel did with his Surfware clothing line or reinvent it in the way that Land Design did with Stretch Hobo. Those would be much better uses of their time than getting upset about what people without any design training do for flyers for kids who don’t care about type.