If I could upvote this 100x, I would! I've just spent an age trying to find the name of that font to post here - kept on thinking it was Eurostile too (which others here appear to dislike too...).
Handel Gothic, the choice of backstreet internet cafes around the world.
Oddly enough the overabundance of foul language made me not want to continue reading after the second paragraph. It just wasn't funny. The guy didn't even use Comic Sans in this piece, which just makes the article an awkward, contrived write-up. Or was that the whole point? :)
Something about this piece reminded me of John Gruber's classic "The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme" (http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/anthropomorphized)
I just read it completely differently, so much so that I wondered if the interpretation had a particular cultural bias. But we're both American so ya got me :)
Anyone heard a story of Indian government sending a condolences letter for the death of a high-ranking Pakistani official? A letter set in Comics Sans.
Iranian commemoration ceremony for Indian soldiers who died in Iran during WW1 and WW2... the wreath stating 'Ambassador of India' seems to be in Comic Sans.
Strange, I pictured Comic Sans more as an out of touch, 53 year old woman who enjoys knitting and is a bit spacey than an angry, egotistical, abusive frat kid, or whatever this is supposed to portray. The author has entirely failed to capture the essence of Comic Sans.
Unexpected juxtapositions are often the basis for humor. And Comic Sans is from the mid 90's, so it isn't an old biddy yet. It is young, and it goes places/does things that others think it shouldn't. So, rebellious teen fits.
There's a lot of hate for Comic Sans, and it's not the fault of the font itself, but the fault of those who use it, and possibly because it's in MS Windows.
If life was fair, people would also be laying into the Chicago font ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_%28typeface%29 ) that ships with Macs, and that can still be seen on designs produced by crappy agencies. However, Apple-bashing is less cool than MS-bashing!
It's not the font, but what it was designed for (fun, on-screen - see http://www.connare.com/whycomic.htm ) and how it's been used (on signage, in print).
There's also the element of wanting to appear a font snob by picking the easy target of Comic Sans... As Connare himself said "If you love it, you don’t know much about typography and if you hate it you really don’t know much about typography either and you should get another hobby."
( http://www.manic.com.sg/blog/archives/000118.php )
What's wrong with Chicago? Chicago was genius. Old Macs had black and white screens, no grayscale. But grayed-out text was a necessity for showing disabled or unavailable items in the desktop GUI Apple was developing. Most bitmapped fonts are completely unreadable if they are checkerboard-dithered to appear at 50% gray on a black-and-white screen, because they have mostly one-pixel lines in their glyphs. However, the 2px-wide vertical lines of 12pt Chicago allow it to be completely readable when dithered to 50%.
It was a font built for specific requirements; on today's million-color screens it's out of place, but at the time it was introduced, it made perfect sense.
Nothing's wrong with Chicago, and what you write reinforces the point that often fonts are built for specific requirements, and then used by others in aesthetically inappropriate situations.
Just as Comic Sans was made for screen use by MS Bob, Chicago was made for use on a 1-bit screen - but then both were used in print, and they both suck in print, and even more so at sizes larger than on-screen.
(By the way, that's interesting about the designed-in ditherability of Chicago - thanks for that.)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 74.3 ms ] threadPapyrus: http://www.ediblearrangements.com/
http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/urw/handel-gothic/d-bold/
Handel Gothic, the choice of backstreet internet cafes around the world.
Never let a font like that sleep on your couch "For a week while I get my shit together."
Iranian commemoration ceremony for Indian soldiers who died in Iran during WW1 and WW2... the wreath stating 'Ambassador of India' seems to be in Comic Sans.
If life was fair, people would also be laying into the Chicago font ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_%28typeface%29 ) that ships with Macs, and that can still be seen on designs produced by crappy agencies. However, Apple-bashing is less cool than MS-bashing!
It's not the font, but what it was designed for (fun, on-screen - see http://www.connare.com/whycomic.htm ) and how it's been used (on signage, in print).
There's also the element of wanting to appear a font snob by picking the easy target of Comic Sans... As Connare himself said "If you love it, you don’t know much about typography and if you hate it you really don’t know much about typography either and you should get another hobby." ( http://www.manic.com.sg/blog/archives/000118.php )
It was a font built for specific requirements; on today's million-color screens it's out of place, but at the time it was introduced, it made perfect sense.
Just as Comic Sans was made for screen use by MS Bob, Chicago was made for use on a 1-bit screen - but then both were used in print, and they both suck in print, and even more so at sizes larger than on-screen.
(By the way, that's interesting about the designed-in ditherability of Chicago - thanks for that.)