Okay, first of all a quick narrative. Not so long ago, I have been through one of those days when I randomly decide to go on a nostalgic trip by revisiting some of the archived memories of my past which include childhood photos and unbelievable cringe that can result in reduced self-esteem for about a day or two. I came across this weird PowerPoint presentation where I used comic sans for my main heading and the topic was ‘Democracy in my country’. This made me realize how feckless I was.

But, I somehow managed to think about the ‘what if’. I said to myself, “what if comic sans wasn’t the most hated font of all time”.

Introducing the notorious sans-serif typeface  

It was 1995 and operating systems were taking its baby steps towards a PC-dominant future and Microsoft have decided to release a new software product which was intended to provide a more user-friendly interface for the Windows 3.1x, Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems, superseding the Windows Program Manager. They name it ‘Microsoft Bob’. Now,the interactive dog in the program has to communicate with the user in talk bubbles. According to BBC, Melinda Gates herself, asked Vincent Connare(type-designer and former employee at Microsoft) to design a font for the cartoon dog to speak in. In three days, Connare had designed Comic Sans. It was based on hand-drawn fonts from comic books. But, it was never used in the final version of Microsoft Bob, although was subsequently released as a font in numerous Microsoft products.  

Now, here lies the catch. Comic Sans is now free to be used by millions of people, be it highly qualified type-designers or amateurs who never really knew what a font meant. Unfortunately, they seem to have liked it and started using the font in rather less appropriate places. Comic sans looks perfect for a birthday greeting card, or a children’s toy but it was being used in places like office visiting cards, formal letters, business e-mails, an official Canadian coin, gravestone to name a few. This wasn’t a savoring sight to some of the more intellectual or people who see a type as something more than words. 

Let’s see what makes Comic Sans a terrible font.  

1. Poor Letterfit and Weight management 

Letterfit is a general term meaning “the adjustment of spacing between characters in a piece of text”. Let me compare the letterfit of helvetica which is widely regarded as the greatest font of all time, to Comic Sans’.  

The letterfit of Helvetica allows for it to inherently have decent kerning tables. Kerning is the distance between two letters, and good fonts have parameters set for just about every letter combination. Usually, a font is scaled to be good when the kerning tables could be produced easily or automatically(in case of helvetica). But, for Comic Sans, producing the kerning tables is nearly impossible. For example, in the image above, look at the even spacing between every letter in helvetica. This is why, its kerning tables can be produced automatically. The legendary typeface of helvetica, is designed in such a way that, whatever may the combination of letters be, you could probably never see uneven space between them — such was the letterfit of the masterpiece. Now coming back to Comic Sans, the awkward space between the ‘f’ and the ‘o’ is largely apparent — which makes the production of kerning tables almost unfathomable, although this just is a solitary example. 

Another area where Comic Sans is significantly underwhelming is Weight Management.  

The image above is quite self-explanatory. Just have a look at the point in helvetica, where the stem meets the shoulder. Look how the weight is calmly distributed. On one hand, I love the way helvetica is designed and it is no wonder there is a movie entirely dedicated to it. On the other hand, there’s this carelessly handled design of Comic Sans. (Don’ t)Look at the ugly dark region at the junction of the letter ’n’ in Comic Sans above. I might want to apologize for displaying such zoomed-in examples, which may have made you uncomfortable just looking at them.  

The above picture is a blurred body copy of Helvetica and Comic Sans, side-by-side. The overall shade of the Helvetica body is unsurprisingly even because of its well-balanced weight all over the letters. Similarly unsurprising is the Comic Sans part of the picture where the blurred body has uneven shading. If you look closely, wherever there is an ‘n’ or a ‘t’, there is an extra-dark spot when compared to the whole body.  

2. The Uncanny Valley theory 

This is another popular opinion, on how Comic Sans has amassed such a huge anti-fandom. They say, the human or child-like handwriting font may as well be lying in the trenches of uncanny valley. 

According to Wikipedia, the uncanny valley “ is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object’s resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object”. In simple words, it is a part of the graph drawn between the humanness of an entity and the elicited reaction(or likeability) from the human observer. This concept often comes up in robotics or aesthetics. It states that, ‘the more human something gets, the cuter it becomes(the more we like it) — until it is almost human, but no quite.  

As you can see, in the above illustration, there is a remarkable dip in the curve which extends to the other side of the horizontal axis. This valley-shaped region of the curve is named ‘the uncanny valley’. Bunraku puppets, human corpse, still or moving prosthetic hand, all fall into this region quite rightfully. Maybe, Comic Sans also could be added to the list as it closely resembles to the handwriting of a human, but still can be easily distinguishable. This may seem like a lame reason for the hatred around Comic Sans, but it is undeniably interesting.  

Comic Sans is not being used where it’s meant to be 

Remember, why the font of Comic Sans was created in the first place? It was meant to be used on aliased screens. 

Anti-aliasing is the technology that makes fonts look smooth on-screen. Without anti-aliasing, fonts look jagged — as if they were made of legos. Now in this scenario, Comic Sans does a pretty good job than fonts like Garamond.  

One can easily say that Comic Sans is by far, more readable than Garamond when the screens are aliased. So, Comic Sans does really well at the purpose of its invention. 

Bonus Fact: Comic Sans is a dyslexia-friendly font and is widely used for teaching young children because of its distinct shapes of letters.  

Finally, should we hate Comic Sans? 

No, we should not. Perhaps, we need to change the way we think of Comic Sans as a font. It certainly isn’t the best font design-wise, but it does a really good job at what it is actually there for, as aforesaid. 

People hate Comic Sans so much, that there is an entire movement dedicated to its banishment. There have been numerous petitions, a website based solely on its hatred, a ‘kill comic sans’ game which you can play online. Maybe, it doesn’t deserve that level of hatred in my opinion.