Why do people hate Comic Sans?

Sorry without googling it,I don’t know what a comic san is, perhaps you might explain it??

It’s a typeface.
I actually like and use it.

I don’t hate it, but some people see it as resembling a child’s handwriting, thus it looks childish and goofy and does not have the polished professional look of Times New Roman or Arial/Helvetica.

I like it too and it is my default font in word for when I have to type cert letters for my customers.

Because a meme told them to, and some people cannot resist a bandwagon when it comes rolling by.

It’s not even good for comics.

This is pretty funny.

I had to look it up, and the first result that popped up on Google was “comic sans hate”. Erm. Well I couldn’t say why. Seems perfectly fine to me.

It’s not that this font is hated; it has taken on its own culture, just like other fonts have. Certain fonts are used to establish context. When this becomes common, its human nature to interpret specific fonts to convey its message, its personality, its level of humor.

If the PM of Germany were to have her message to the country printed in this font, how might it impact both her and the newspaper’s reputation?

I agree that it has become hated; I see people dissing it all the time. I like it and used it a lot in advertising about 15 years ago. Maybe that’s the answer – like cocker spaniels or Boston terriers, it was overbred and now is looked down on.

I suspect a major source of the disdain for it comes from the fact that it lacks the “buttoned down” look of a more traditional serif or sans serif font. For a long time I used it as an alternative to Tahoma, the sans serif font I used as my default font. For much of this year I have ceased using Window’s own fonts in favor of some of the custom fonts I have installed on my laptop.

It is because it presents a false sense of friendliness, but is usually used for signs detailing prohibited behavior.

It gets used by Human Resources Departments for “friendly” notices to empty the office refrigerator or lose your stuff; by apartment managers to tell people to not have so much garbage, by neighbors to tell people to pick up their newspapers by 8 a.m. or be quiet after 6 p.m.

Teachers use it to send notes home telling parents about mandatory supplies, or mandatory contributions to a bake sale.

Interesting that the new Google logo has no serifs.

I simply write in crayon, thereby avoiding all fonts.

Meh. It’s not particularly appealing, but it’s not nearly as bad as Papyrus.

I like Comic Sans, because of its childlike quality.

Memes and bandwagons considered, I think the contempt is pretty well-deserved. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were someone’s actual handwriting. But it’s the fontilization (yeah, I just made that up) of something that has no real redeeming qualities. It’s painfully contrived. And I think @zenvelo hit it on the head…in the world of fonts, it’s kind of a passive aggressive dick.

@fluthernutter But surely it isn’t the font that’s passive aggressive. It’s a subset of the font’s users who are being passive aggressive. And while I could understand why someone might come to have a negative association with the font because of that usage, taking it out on the font itself is like getting mad at the glove on the hand of someone who has slapped you.

@SavoirFaire In this case, the glove is so unattractive that it’s more offensive than the slap. The kerning (space between letters) and the weighting of the letters themselves are all inconsistent (haphazardly so). This results in the text looking awkward.

One technique that typographers will use is putting a gaussian blur across the text so it becomes illegible. The result should have a relatively smooth appearance. Use this same technique on comic sans (or other bad fonts) and you’ll see patches of dark and big gaps where there shouldn’t be. That’s the hallmark of a bad font with poor balance characteristics.

Just so it’s clear, my complaint isn’t that the font is fun, whimsical, or that I expect all fonts to be angular, geometric, and rigid. The complaint is that comic sans is bad at what it’s trying to do.

@gorillapaws That seems like a great reason to not use the font, not to hate other people who do use it. Also, is all this hate directed at the original Comic Sans, or are people unaware that there are updated versions? Or maybe no one cares now that the bandwagon has reached cruising speed?

@SavoirFaire I certainly don’t hate people for their font choices. Comic Sans is like the garden gnome of typography. I don’t hate people who litter their yard with gnomish statuary, but I might snicker when I drive past their house and question their aesthetic sensibilities.

I can’t help but think that this is just another example of an extremely cynical generation to gain a modicum of popularity among their peers by ridiculing an almost meaningless triviality. It doesn’t justify a bit of print beyond the trade. Everybody wants to be a Dorothy Parker, but few have the brains and elan. It would be good to remember that in the end, she was so unpopular to the people around her, nobody would claim that woman’s ashes for something like 17 years until the NAACP stepped up.

@gorillapaws But in the real world, the users of Comic Sans are often met with hate. Furthermore, the font itself is often blamed for its users’ actions. That’s what I was responding to, so your personal distaste for the font seems irrelevant. De gustibus non est disputandum, after all.

@SavoirFaire I certainly don’t condone people hating others for their font choices either. I don’t follow your point: “the font itself is often blamed for its users’ actions.”

There are no good reasons to use the font (there are many alternatives that are better). I can blame the person for having poor aesthetic taste or lacking typographical sophistication. I wouldn’t blame the Comic Sans font if it were used for a holdup note in a bank robbery. The whole hate thing seems like a straw man.

Lastly, it’s not my personal distaste that makes it bad, it’s the objective analysis of the font according to typography standards that make it bad. Typography is both an art and science, so it’s not all about personal taste. Comic Sans has readability issues.

@gorillapaws You seem to have missed a lot of context. Your first response to me was about a comment I made to @fluthernutter, which was in turn about a comment made by @zenvelo. This part of the discussion was about a particular reason one might dislike the font (i.e., how some people have used it), and I was questioning whether it made sense to blame a font for how it is used. There might be other reasons to dislike it, but that’s not what this part of the discussion was about. Therefore, talking about kerning and so forth is entirely irrelevant to this part of the discussion (which is the part you injected yourself into when you made your first response to me).

As for there being no good reasons to use the font, I think that’s flatly wrong. Here’s the best possible reason: some people like it. Not everything that people write is for public consumption, so anyone who likes it has no reason to care about anything other than their personal preference when writing things for themselves. This is not necessarily the only time when it might be acceptable, but you only need one case to disprove an absolute.

I also think it is mistaken to think that any font can be objectively bad. Even if we grant the claim about readability, readability is a preference. It only seems otherwise because it is an assumed goal (one taken up by the “science” portion of typography) rather than an explicit one. Furthermore, this preference is contextual as there may be times when a lack of readability is contextually desirable (mystery games come to mind). It’s one thing to dislike Comic Sans and not use it. It’s another to tell people they are wrong for liking it and using it. All aesthetic judgments are subjective. But people convince themselves that their judgments are better by imposing their preferences and concerns onto others.

@SavoirFaire I agree that it is an assumed goal of typography that it should be readable. I find it hard to think of cases where it’s desirable for a font to be difficult to read. There may be exceptions like an ornate drop cap, or a decorative gothic script. It seems obvious to me that readability would be one of the characteristics of the Platonic ideal of what a font should be. It’s been years since I took a course on Aesthetics, but I seem to recall that it’s reasonable to apply objective standards to aesthetic judgments. Otherwise one could argue that a crayon scribble on a napkin has more aesthetic value than a Van Gough, or someone farting into a kazoo is better than a symphony by Beethoven. It’s the same problem you run into with moral subjectivism/relativism right?

Readability is testable experimentally (time people reading things and see how many errors are made). Weighting, kerning, leading, balance are all measurable objectively.

I will concede that I was wrong in my statement “There are no good reasons to use the font”. It is appropriate when you’re creating something you are certain someone else will never read, or in situations when you deliberately want a difficult to read, unbalanced, and poorly weighted font that conveys the tone of a poorly-executed attempt at reproducing the text of comics. I can’t think of when those times might be, but I may have been hasty in assuming they never exist.