Before the GUI, no one cared about fonts. Then along came the Mac and Windows and suddenly the word font was more than just a snooty way to refer to a fountain.
The early fonts were grotesque by today’s standards. They were bitmapped, which meant they looked good on the old, low resolution dot matrix impact printers and the displays of the day. When you tried to change their size, however, things got ugly quick. Still, they were better than the courier/typewriter fonts from text mode operating systems.
Font technology leapt forward throughout the 1990s. Adobe and Microsoft introduced competing font standards. Eventually scalable fonts were available, which could dynamically re-size and look good.
To entice you, Microsoft tossed in a bunch of free fonts with each release of Windows. They also sold a Windows Plus Pack, which included even more fonts. Lodged among them was a typeface named Comic Sans.
The Comic Sans font is rather pleasant, like casual writing. Figure 1 illustrates a Comic Sans font dump in Windows 7.
Figure 1. The Comic Sans font.
The problem with Comic Sans was its own popularity. Because it was handwritten and fun, it was intensely overused. The font appeared everywhere, and often for purposes that weren’t specifically fun, such as funeral notices or in official documents.
Comic Sans itself wasn’t to blame, of course. The real problem was that typefaces were suddenly available to the general public. People who had no design or layout experience were producing documents because they could. Soon the trend snowballed to the point where professional graphics designers would grimace each time they saw the Comic Sans font used — for anything!
I could rant on, mostly because I enjoy it, but the article from BBS News Magazine (below) does a better job explaining why the Comic Sans fonts is detested by so many professionals.
