James's Weblog

I admit that I hate Comic Sans partially as an attempt to be an elitist snob. Being on the bandwagon is amusing. But mostly I hate it because I think it’s an ugly font. It feels strange; it looks too mechanical to be mistaken for handwriting, but it’s not as neat, clean, and formal as a normal typewritten font. It’s in the uncanny valley of typefaces.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, its creator, Vincent Connare, said:

If you love it, you don’t know much about typography… if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.

I’m only a wanna-be typographer and typophile, but I think Comic Sans doesn’t offend me as much as a typeface enthusiast as it does as a comic book reader. Connare designed it to mimic comic book lettering, but it doesn’t look like real lettering from comic books. Let’s look at some samples from some prolific comic book letterers:

• Artie Simek (from The Amazing Spider-Man, volume 1, issue 121 (1973)):
  
• Tom Orzechowski (from The Uncanny X-Men, volume 1, issue 137 (1980)):
  
• Janice Chiang (from Conan the Barbarian, volume 1, issue 155 (1984)):
  
• Rick Parker (from The Amazing Spider-Man, volume 1, issue 300 (1988)):
  

And now compare to Comic Sans:

Even Dave Gibbons, the artist whose work from Watchmen partially inspired Comic Sans, calls it “a real mess”. An obvious difference is that normal comic book lettering uses only uppercase characters, making Comic Sans’s lowercase characters feel even more unnatural. Even uppercase Comic Sans doesn’t look much better, however.

The weight is wrong; comic book lettering traditionally uses a heavier weight for legibility. Comic Sans’s bold variant looks a bit better, although I think it still looks a bit too mechanical.

Comic book lettering often is slightly tilted (Tom Orzechowski’s work is a notable exception). I will concede that Comic Sans in all uppercase, bold, italics is not completely horrible. (Blasphemy, I know.)

If only that were the default look.

Oh, Chelmsford. Cheap attempts to get national recognition through Fox News by equating Santa to Nazis aren’t what I want my childhood hometown known for, although I do commend the application of Godwin’s Law.

Can’t we follow Futurama’s lead by making Christmas non-religious and renaming it to Xmas? (Preferably with fewer murderous robots.)

Doodles I drew on various Sony CLIÉ handhelds from 2001–2003. Like all other Palm OS devices, they used resistive touchscreens that lacked any kind of pressure-sensitivity, and the digitizers in the touchscreens were somewhat noisy, so hand-drawn lines ended up with a shaky appearance.

I made the first image with TealPaint (which at the time supported only the traditional Palm OS resolution of 160×160 and not the 320×320 resolution of the CLIÉ devices). I made the rest with MemoRu!.

• Troll (2001-05-31)
  
• Demon (unfinished) (2002-03-03)
  
• Heathcliff (2001-12-02)
  
• Dragon head (2001-12-04)
  
• Ant man (2001-12-02)
  
• Fat baby (2003-03-24)
  

Acrylic on cardstock. A DIY print I made from a foam egg carton impressed with a dull pencil at the 2007 Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA.

Yes, that’s the “(electrical) ground” symbol on the flag, which is lame, but I couldn’t think of anything on the spot.

More dragons, doodled between people’s presentations during a VMware R&D conference in December, 2007.

(I really need to start drawing other things. Or I at least need to stop drawing disembodied heads all the time.)

A wyvern I doodled in 2003.

A birthday card I made with Corrie in 1996 for Michael Feng, teddy bear nut. I sketched out the main parts and the poem title in pencil, and Corrie inked it, colored it, and did all of the other lettering. (In other words, she did all of the time-consuming parts.)

The eyes ended up inverted; I meant for them to be black with white glints (but who am I to question Corrie’s artistic judgment?). I think the way it came out, though, does give the bear some more personality as he tries to avert his eyes from the horrors inflicted upon him.

A couple of old stories that I never got around to posting:

Three years ago, a group of my friends set me up on a blind date with a girl they all knew. By coincidence, each of them knew her in unrelated ways. She was Chinese, a year younger than me, and also had gone to U.C. Berkeley as an undergraduate.

I went along with it. The date went horribly; we were both not very talkative, so the whole thing felt very awkward. I did discover, however, that she used to live in Chelmsford, Massachusetts—the same podunk town that I was from! She lived there somewhat briefly when she was little and didn’t remember much about it though, so sadly it didn’t help conversation much.

Afterward I mentioned it to my mom, who remembered that the Chinese family that used to live a few houses away from us had a daughter the same age. And sure enough, it was her! My parents even found an old photo with the two of us as little kids in it, and her parents found an old photo with me in it.

So much for fate.

Earlier this year, I asked out a Chinese girl that I had recently met playing volleyball. Remarkably she agreed to a date, and even more remarkably, on the date I found out that she too was from Chelmsford! (Her family moved there shortly after mine had moved away, so our paths had never intersected.) The date went well, but once again things inevitably ended up going badly for me anyway.

I think the Fates like taunting me.

Okay, so maybe Chelmsford isn’t quite the podunk town I think of it as. It’s reportedly the 21^st best place to live in the United States according to Money Magazine, and Wikipedia says that the middle school I attended there was the basis for Springfield Elementary in The Simpsons. Still, just meeting someone in California who has even heard of Chelmsford is pretty rare. But meeting someone who’s actually lived there? And someone Asian from a town that’s almost 95% Caucasian (the percentage was probably even higher 20 years ago)? And having it happen twice? And one of those times being a former neighbor?

Obviously there’s the whole thing about the Palm Pre versus the iPhone, but Palm has had a tradition of following Apple’s moves, even ignoring the direct comparisons between the Palm Pilot and the Apple Newton.

It’s a shame that Cobalt was stillborn; I think an upgraded version of Palm OS would have been exactly what I wanted. (ALP could be it, but it still hasn’t shipped on any actual devices, and being so late to the party, I suspect it might end up suffering the same fate as Cobalt.)

After four years, I’ve finally said goodbye to my trusty but beaten-up Treo 650. I started noticing screws missing from it about a month ago, and a couple of weeks ago I lost the antenna, which fell off somewhere without my noticing.

The chipped paint and smudged icons on the buttons? That’s the result of 3½ years of sharing a pocket with my keys. That weird cloud in the center of the screen? It’s dust that seeped in and collected there. That hole in the back cover? I drilled that so that I could easily access the reset button with the stylus. (I admit that it might have contributed to the dust problem.)

I actually could have tried transferring my number to my dad’s old Treo 650, but I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. No more reception was the push I needed to buy the new Palm Pre. (Sorry, iPhone, but I’m a (wanna-be) keyboard snob.) This also marks the end of nine years of using Palm OS.

The Palm Pre is nice. There are a few significant things and a lot of little things that I miss from the Treo 650, but having a modern web browser makes up for all the deficiencies. When I think about it, I realize that I was pretty satisfied with everything about the Treo except for its anemic and ancient browser.

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