simont: A picture of me in 2016 (Default)
posted by [personal profile] simont at 11:39am on 03/04/2014
On Comic Sans:

As [personal profile] rochvelleth says, let's disregard the question of whether it's massively overused in all sorts of contexts where a humorous handwritten aesthetic is wildly inappropriate, and focus on the font itself. If it's used in an appropriate context, say the lettering for an actual comic (e.g. OOTS), how does it fare?

I think it's not nearly so bad in that situation, but one blemish I've never been able to unsee in it is the sticking-out rightmost leg of the m. It's not an implausible sort of glitch to find in the occasional letter of genuine hand-lettered text, but to make it so prominent in this font serves to highlight the faux nature of the handwritten-ness, in that every single m has that exact same glitch. I think that a more sophisticated faux-hand-lettered font which somehow arranged to have different wobbles and errors in different renditions of the same letter (which would, of course, not fit into the usual framework of font file formats and would require a custom text rendering engine of some kind) could perfectly well have the occasional m look like that without spoiling the look of the font as a whole, but within the constraints of a conventional font, a blemish prominent enough for its repeatability to be noticeable breaks suspension of disbelief.

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