That spurred a fruitful discussion, and resulted in a unanimous conclusion: we didn’t think Comic Sans was a badly designed font. We are a creative group, comprised predominantly of graphic designers and web designers, and given our love and enthusiasm of typography, I was quietly surprised at the outcome.

My best guess

My prediction was that people would agree that Comic Sans was terrible and should never again see the light of day. The basis of my postulation was founded on a combination of personal opinion, and the observation of disastrous design decisions, where Comic Sans was involved.

My colleague Matt, explained his perspective to a friend of mine — who’d used Comic Sans in her Microbiology Ph.D Powerpoint — and couldn’t have put it better: “Let me put this into perspective, if I used Comic Sans in my job, I’d get fired”.

Some people just really don’t like it

It’d be a tough call to determine which is more ubiquitous between Comic Sans and Helvetica. You don’t have to look too far to see that Comic Sans is used everywhere, from menus to signage, resumes to presentations.

One thing is more clear: It’s more than often used in the wrong context. Plenty of people are committed to promoting their dislike of the font, and have many followers dedicated to their cause.

I hate to say it, but it’s actually quite a good font

Originally created for children’s computer software produced by Microsoft, Comic Sans was perfectly appropriate and suitable in the application for which is was used. The font used in the beta software was Times New Roman, and Vincent Connare noticed that it was hard to read at a small size, and also wasn’t a particularly fun font.

At this point Connare created Comic Sans solely aimed for applications where children were the audience.

Although it was initially created for a specific Microsoft application, it is widely adopted as a good font for children, because of another distinguishing characteristic: the lowercase “a” is in the shape that children write the letter “a”.

It’s not for me

I personally won’t be using Comic Sans any time soon (unless I write another article about it). There are plenty of fun, child-friendly fonts to use, and have much less of a stigma, and I just couldn’t afford the risk of using it.

Advocating the use of Comic Sans isn’t my intention, but I merely want to point out that the font itself, the shape of the letters, and the intent in which it was created are quite reasonable. Unfortunately for the font itself, it has been misused and abused to the point where it’s unlikely it will ever be redeemed.

Injustice maybe, at the very least it is a defamation of character(s).