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Tuesday 24 January 2012

Comic Sans: The Best Font Since Every Other Font.


For years and years and years, Comic Sans has been the omnipresent nudge in my side, it has spun it's annoying, infuriating web amongst every aspect of modern life. Comic Sans is the guy who rocks up to a house party with a litre bottle of Coke who doesn't ever really fit in with the crowd. Everyone knows he is kind of out of his depth, yet they all love him. He is the guy whose Facebook profile picture depicts his tongue stuck out, eyes screwed and hair spiked up, getting wasted with his mates in a public car park.

It's natural habitat is on a crudely cut piece of A4 inviting you to a barbecue of a neighbor. It also dwells upon adverts for fitness classes at community centers and most depressingly of all it lives on worksheets in Maths classes. What Comic Sans is trying to tell us is that this event/activity/educational task is fun, challenging and will leave you all the happier/fitter/wiser. In reality however, Comic Sans finally asserts all of your long harbored beliefs that A. your neighbors cannot use a computer competently, B this new fitness class is painfully unprofessional and is run by thankless volunteers and C. your Maths teacher has lost all grasp on their adult life, resorting to a jolly font in order to instill some self-importance through the incorrect  assumption that Comic Sans will render themselves outgoing, youthful and friendly in the minds of their students. Cause' kids love Comic Bloody Sans right?

The reason why so many people use it is because of Microsoft. Their vastly popular and for the most part, competent utility package Microsoft Office provides very few fonts which are usable in normal, everyday situations. In fact, through my experience there are only about three. Ariel, which is often deemed too formal, too boring or not exciting enough and Verdana which is way too far down the never-ending drop-down list of ridiculous, intolerable shithouse fonts for people to use it. I don't understand how Microsoft failed to implement simple, understated, everyday fonts for the average man. As a result of this they have given the world Comic Sans the third and final 'usable' font for every self-employed IT technician who advertises in the windows of newsagents.

Their fonts range from the ludicrous such as Wingdings with its fleeting moment of hilarity when you discover you can write stuff in code (When you're about 9) to the pointlessly robotic and formulaic fonts like Unicode. It's not as if Ariel is the be-all-and-end-all. Fonts do actually exist outside the insanity of MS Word. Please implement some Microsoft. PLEASE!

PLEAAAAASSEEEEE!!!

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