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.

Well, I’m back from the CHI 2006 conference in Montreal. I stayed at the Hyatt Regency, which the conference organizers recommended, but I later discovered there were hotels just as close to the convention hall that had better rooms, better service, and that were cheaper too.

Things I didn’t like about the Hyatt Regency in Montreal:

• The light switches were in non-standard locations. Rather than having the switches for the main area and for the entryway arranged side-by-side as usual, the switches were arranged vertically.
• The only light switch to the bathroom was on the outside. It confounded me every time.
• The bathroom was not laid out well. The towel rack was on the opposite side from the sink, so after washing my hands, I had to drip water across the floor before I could dry them off.
• The shower faucet confused me. It took me a couple of minutes without my glasses to notice that it’s the small ridge along the top that points to the temperature, not the handle itself like in my shower at home. (Incidentally, the valve in the faucet broke the morning of my return flight, so it was broken in more than ways than one.)
• The hotel room’s alarm clock used Comic Sans for its labels. Good gravy. I immediately knew I’d hate it.
• The alarm clock had no buttons to adjust the hour for the current time or for the alarm time; there were only minute adjustment buttons. (To make matters worse—and this wasn’t really the hotel’s fault—but its time was off by 12 hours when I got the room. It’s a good thing I noticed!)
• The alarm clock was a radio alarm clock, and the volume knob controlled only the radio; it didn’t control the normal alarm chirp, which happened to be way too quiet.
• Hyatt charged money for Internet access, and it’s hard to find the rate from the hotel’s internal website. Just to get to the pricing page, I first needed to try to sign up for service and to accept a license agreement. And even once there, the pricing page was hard to understand, listing prices in a seemingly random order. (Luckily, the Hyatt apparently blocked just web traffic; ssh access was unrestricted, so I used Remote Desktop through an ssh tunnel to do everything I needed.)
• They didn’t leave chocolates on my pillows.
• There was a plate in the hallway by my door when I arrived, and it was there for the following three nights. I swear it got closer to my door every night.
• Half of the television stations were in French, and the ones that were in English had mostly American programming.

In contrast, the hotel that Jeff Wong stayed at was cheaper, had free Internet service, was large and spacious, and even had a kitchen and fridge.

One nice thing about the Hyatt was that it was connected to the convention hall by way of an underground shopping mall, so I could get to the conference without going into the outside cold. Still, it wasn’t so cold in Montreal that it was a big advantage, and I’d rather have seen more of the city anyway. I didn’t get to look at any of the stores either, since almost everything was closed outside of the conference hours.

Some cool font/typography/letterform pages I’ve come across recently:

• Fontifier: turn your handwriting into your very own TrueType font!
• WhatTheFont?!: automatic font identification
• John Langdon’s Ambigrams
• The Scourge of Arial
• Ligature Schmigature