Comic Sans, that unassuming jaunty typeface lurking inside millions of computers, has become the target of an online hate campaign. Simon Garfield explains why normally mild-mannered people are so enraged by its use. Originally posted on bbc.co.uk
How did schools ever advertise their Christmas fairs without it? Has a homemade birthday card ever looked so friendly written in anything else? Have type lovers ever found anything they loathe as much?
If you wrote these questions in Comic Sans you’d have something that was warm, inoffensive and rather 
unsuitable, a typeface that’s gone wrong. And you’d also have something guaranteed to provoke a howl of protest.
Comic Sans is unique: used the world over, it’s a typeface that doesn’t really want to be type. It looks homely and handwritten, something perfect for things we deem to be fun and liberating. Great for the awnings of toyshops, less good on news websites or on gravestones and the sides of ambulances.
Last year it stuck out like an unfunny joke in Time magazine and Adidas adverts, and even the BBC wasn’t immune, choosing the font to promote its Composers of the Year during the Proms.
What can be done? One can buy the “Ban Comic Sans” mugs, caps and T-shirts, and help finance a documentary called Comic Sans, Or the Most Hated Font In The World.
Black-tie do (not)
Holly and David Combs, the husband and wife cottage industry behind bancomicsans.com, argue that the misuse of the font is “analogous to showing up for a black tie event in a clown costume”. Some of what the Combses have to say is tongue-in-cheek, but it is hard to disagree with their claims that type – used well or badly – has the ability to express meaning far beyond the basic words it clothes.
But why, more than any other font, has Comic Sans inspired so much revulsion?
Partly because its ubiquity has led to such misuse (or at least to uses far beyond its original intentions). And partly because it is so irritably simple, so apparently written by a 
small child. Helvetica is everywhere and simple too, but it usually has the air of modern Swiss sophistication about it, or at least corporate authority. Comic Sans just smirks at you, and begs to be printed in multiple colours.
Perhaps the most comic thing about Comic Sans is that it was never designed as a font for common use. It was intended merely as a perfect solution to a small corporate problem.
It was created in 1994 by Vincent Connare, who worked at Microsoft with the title of “typographic engineer”.
