Context-specific type: Comic Sans
Mark Boulton tweets what I’ve felt all along about Comic Sans:
I think, from this day on, I’m on a mission to defend Comic Sans. It’s really not a bad typeface at all.
Following up with:
Comic Sans is not at fault here. It’s not a bad typeface. It’s the victim of ordinary people making uniformed design decisions.
Yes! Comic Sans is a victim; and the culprits, ordinary people.
Most typefaces can lend themselves to most contexts; the best are praised for their transparency. But Comic Sans is not a transparent type. The lightheartedness of the font is so clear in its design it’s an offense to see it used in inappropriate contexts.
The ubiquity of Comic Sans in print ephemera, and to a lesser extent, websites, suggests it has some things going for it. Or that, as Mark Boulton suggests, there should be better tools for choosing type – something superior to a dropdown menu.
Perhaps the cause would be helped by a basic typography education movement?
More about Comic Sans’ history here.
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It’d be really interesting to see a mockup of a better type selector. I’m not trained in typography in any way, so any decisions I make come out of eyeballing it (although I’m probably much more advanced than most casual users). Anything that’d make that job easier would be amazing.