I go off about Comic Sans again.

As I mentioned earlier, I ran into Brigid from Mangablog on the train back to Boston from NYCC and we had what was, frankly, a fantastic conversation about comics, creators, the state of the medium, its future, and just about everything else. Somehow, we got around to fonts (of course we did – this always happens when I’m around) and Brigid innocently stated “I like Comic Sans.”

I let this pass because the company was too pleasant to mar with an extended diatribe about her utter wrongness. In fact, I forgot about the conversation until Monday afternoon, when I was in the co-op grabbing dinner materials and I came across a locally-made whoopie pie that featured the font proudly on its label. That’s when the reasoning for my fonthate bubbled to the surface: it’s lazy.

While I may just not like the damned thing’s form factor, I can understand people in offices using it to liven up what is most likely the dullest of dull paperwork. Forgive? No. But I understand. I’ll even let family get a pass in those dreary annual letters about how they’re doing because they’re not really supposed to care like I do.

It’s when this typeface works its ways into commercial applications that my hackles are raised. I was looking at this label and it hit me: if this company cares so little about their image that they’re using a crappy basic Microsoft font in their marketing and packaging. how am I supposed to trust they’re going to not take shortcuts everywhere else? Customer-facing materials are their first chance to sell me on their goods and if a label looks like something that could have been hacked out by my sister-in-law, it makes me question the company’s ability to make the right decisions elsewhere at some level.

This isn’t a conscious process (really!), but I was made very aware of it as it’s a nice confluence between some of my favorite things: desserts, fonts, and marketing.

PS: No, I don’t think Comic Sans will hurt me.

PPS: Yes, I feel this way about Arial, too.

PPPS: Steve Jobs said this better in 1996: