In the last couple of weeks, two fonts were released that even I as a full stack dev could not miss: Geist by Vercel and Monaspace by GitHub. I even changed the font of my VSCode to Monaspace Argon instead of the default font. And to be honest, I normally don’t hold strong opinions about fonts. At some point I jumped on the bandwagon of calling a certain font the worst of all time, but in the last few days I looked into typography a bit more.
That being said, I know that font is technically the wrong term, it should be typeface. Steve Jobs is to blame for this, he brought fonts to personal computers and called it fonts, so this is what I will stick with today. But let me explain.
font vs. typeface
Researching this I learned the difference between font and typeface. A typeface is the design of individual letters, be it serif, sans-serif, decorative or any other option that comes to mind.
So Helvetica or Fira Mono (the “font” being used here at the moment, who knows, maybe I’ll change it to Monaspace at some point) are different typefaces.
Fonts can be the same typeface, but just have different sizes. Arial with 12px is a different font than Arial with 14px.
The world’s most hated font
Comic Sans. Let’s face it, everyone knows at least one example of this font being used in inappropriate situations - the worst example that comes to my mind was Comic Sans on a War Memorial in the Netherlands.
This is of course not its intended use. It is supposed to be playful, to be read especially by children, not as a serious font.
It was created by Vincent Connare, the creator of Trebuchet and other famous fonts, in 1995. At this time, Microsoft created Microsoft Bob, a program to get users acquainted with their first computer. A key part of it was a dog called Rover, along with other cartoon characters, that explained some concepts to the user.
It was supposed to be playful, with typical speech bubbles you would imagine. But there was no font that really fit them. Serif fonts are right out of the picture, but sans serif fonts also seemed to be too formal.
Connare recognized this problem and took inspiration from his favorite comic books: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. I find this kind of ironic, two comics that are not what I would call playful were the inspiration for Comic Sans. But he liked the font in the comic books so much that he took inspiration from them and created Comic Sans.
The initial reception was actually pretty good. The font was a nice alternative to the existing fonts if you did not want your text to look too serious. With the widespread of personal computers, it was just a matter of time until some users start to use the font in places it should never be used.
The redemption of Comic Sans
It became a joke font among graphic designers, especially if you looked at the characteristics:
- the
kerningis not consistent. What is that, you might ask. Kerning is the adjustment of the space between individual characters in a font to achieve a visually pleasing result. This is not the case in Comic Sans - some combination of characters might have more space between them than others. - typically, if you would mirror the letter
b, you would get the letterdand vice versa. But if you would try the same in Comic Sans this is not what would happen. The letters are slightly different. - varying angles and heights of characters also did contribute to the font not being loved by graphic designers.
But all these characteristics and quirks of the font are actually a blessing for a specific group of people: readers with dyslexia. Thankfully I’m not dyslexic myself, but I know people that are and without a doubt the choice of font has a big impact on the legibility of a text for them.
Because the letters are easily distinguishable from each other, Comic Sans is one of the most legible fonts in use. But not only that, there have been studies that showed that readers retained more information from text if it was displayed in Comic Sans rather than a more traditional serif font.
I even found an article claiming that switching to Comic Sans can help unclog the dreaded writer’s block.
Maybe we should let go of our collective hate of this font and embrace it in situations where its use is appropriate. Certain users will be happy that we haven’t forgotten about them.