lol comic sans. what a kidder XD

There's a use for every font and a font for every use, I suppose, although I'll admit I sure as hell can't think of the use that would demand Comic Sans.

a birthday card?

Not on my birthday card!

A blogger I read uses Comic Sans when he's quoting stupid arguments. ~;3

Hah! Nice.

check and mate

PZ Myers, huh?

Bingo!

as with any medium, all in how you use it! http://queenston.tumblr.com/post/972547982

I wholeheartedly agree that usage is everything, though it's a bit dubious whether that still constitutes the use of Comic Sans, given the aggressive manual resizing, kerning and other manipulations. It stands as a testament that, with enough work, any font can be made to shine, but I don't know that it redeems the font, per se.

In general, I feel like fonts that are wholly unusable (for one reason or another) straight out of the box, as it were, are probably best replaced by fonts which are usable. It's kind of the same as my take on folks who recreate the Mona Lisa using MSPaint and a mouse -- sure, you can do it, but...why?

touché! i wasn't aware we were talking about out of the box use - in that case, yes, it's god-awful

i mean, granted, some fonts are designed to be manipulated and not used right out of the box, but we're getting into a different realm of typefaces that isn't exactly comic sans' homeland.

Haha, and I don't mean to come across as a contrary Mary, either -- you make very legitimate points, and the sample you link to is perfectly handsome.

I try not to be a mindless hater of the popular punching bag fonts like Comic Sans and Papyrus (just like I try not to be that guy who fawns over Garamond and Helvetica as the only two fonts anyone ever needs ever), even if I would prescribe them a time out <3 Like you say, you can make just about anything work with enough design savvy!

I'm sure this demands Comic Sans.

I'm not sure that demands anything.

It doesn't.

My fiancee actually uses it on her IM clients because IRL her voice is small and cute like a kid, and she wanted that feeling to carry in chats. xD She's also a dork, but hey, it works!

I'm not sure I want to think about what I think Comic Sans sounds like... Haha, but I'm sure your fiancee has a lovely voice.

She does, just a bit younger than most lol. xD

irony

Yeah, that's about all I got, too <3

Haha, it makes me think of these.

I did use it for a comic, whixh is a horrible, horrible faux pas, and should only be done after a lot of careful consideration adn soul searching. In this case, I was going for a strict, kinda hollow style. So I needed a font with a thiny bit of life to it, but which still had a kind of... dead look to it. A soul-less font that still had some shape to it to match my cartoons rather than fade into the background. Comic sans dseemed to fit that description perfectly, you can see the results here: http://www.webcomicsnation.com/owlo.....;chapter=45566

Infuriating hipsters.

Step 1: Don't ever use Papyrus

JAMES CAMERON.

JOSS WHEDON.



Though to his credit, they really were trying to make Serenity on as low a budget as possible. Serenity = $39 million, Avatar = $500+ million to make.

The cover font is one thing but the entire movie of Avatar had every Navi subtitle set in papyrus. To be honest due to the setting and nature of the movie I doesn't really bother me too much, it's not an entirely bad use of it but a nearly three hour long movie with bright yellow papyrus subtitles either way might seem a bit unpleasant to some.

Now that you mention it, I remember those stupid fucking subtitles now. At first I was amused then quickly annoyed with them. For the record though I didn't much care for Avatar (at all). At least I wasn't paying. But I love Serenity! One might say even, I aim to misbehave.

I actually thought it was pretty good, as long as you take away the incredibly self-embarrassing fanatical fans it's decent but yeah, for a movie with such a high budget they could've certainly used a better font. Alien jungles or not, the temptation should've been resisted haha.

You would THINK with a budget that big, with so many people on staff someone would have stepped in and said..."Ummm, excuse me. I don't think this is a good decision." But I guess it's James Cameron's pet movie so...*shrugs* What can ya do? Personally, if I had a pet movie to spend half a billion dollars on I would have done something more original than retold Fern Gulley with hornless Ronsos.

asdl;fkjas;dlfkjasdf LOL

STAY AWAY FROM THE SUMMONER.

xD LMFTO

disagreed! papyrus is a terrible general typeface, but can be used incredibly stylishly if you know how to treat it. comic sans is the exact same way. they just get a bad rap because people don't know shit about how to lay them out :]

The only problem with that is they've been misused so long they've become cliché. It's not even about proper usage with them so much now, since to a lot of people the font will undoubtedly stick out like a sore thumb. Once this occurs, the project's visual impact will be diminished, as the font will no longer act as a unifying element, or bring balance to the piece. It will then become a distracting element, taking away from the original message and intent of the piece. In short, even if you feel that Comic Sans or Papyrus would work really well in some situation, the better option would be to find another suitable font that doesn't have negative emotions tied to it.

I'm inclined to agree! They've taken on specific baggage that basically precludes their unironic usage, at least for the time being.

Thanks for posting this. I have a lot to read through with all the links from that link. Design layout and font are two things I wish my school went more in depth on, but they're opening a Graphic Design minor next year so that should bring in some interesting new courses. :3

Sweet! Yeah, I would totally love to take some more design classes <3

In the meantime, I've got a whole interweb full of essays and tutorials to crawl, I suppose!

i both agree and disagree. i understand it's easy to see something and immediately recognize the negativity it may have. however, anything can be used properly.

http://queenston.tumblr.com/post/972547982 while i could've used something in place of this, i think most would agree that it has a really fun attitude if you spend some time with it. the "N" is my least favorite character in the set, but for the most part, it's not bad! :]

i've seen comic sans stylized similarly in other situations, and even though i recognize it as such, i can still dig its use. same goes for papyrus - there are a couple shops at the mall here that use it, but each letter is carved out of a nice wood, and placed nicely so that the letters kind of nudge into eachother a bit. it honestly looks really classy. i recognized it, of course, but enjoyed its use.

when it comes to super high end design work, you obviously don't want to be using them, but there are times when they work. after all, most of the populace is pretty unconcerned with what typeface is used to get an effect, and more concerned about the final effect that it gives off.

Yes, but I find it's not a matter of proper usage. Just like the article above used clothing analogies, I'm going to use an analogy of my own; I like cars. I wanna say that Comic Sans and Papyrus have become the ricey Honda Civics of font. It's what you use when you want to look cool and clearly have no idea what you're doing. There is a large group of people who are so disgusted by the way ricers make their cars look, and how they act in public that they WILL NOT even consider buying a Honda Civic of any kind themselves. Even a brand new one. Even though they'd be using them for the correct reasons (an efficient economy car). Some people will not even look at a car from Honda because they're emotions from ricers are so negative. Even though that has nothing to do with Honda as a company. And yes, you once in a while see a Civic that was customized real nice, and it's real clean (just like your example displaying Comic Sans in a proper use). But even still, no one thinks that's cool, and no one cares. That's very important. To spend so much time and effort on a project that no one cares about. In the same sense, even if you can use Comic Sans and Papyrus with great skill, why would you use something in a project that people are SICK of SEEING?

Yes, Comic Sans has a fun shape to it. And Papyrus has a classy yet earthy feel to it, but you see them everywhere. And even the general public will recognize that on some level. And because of this, if you choose to use Papyrus on a project, it will not look as original as if you just chose another font. There is a huge reason Coke Cola is one of the most recognized brands on Earth, and it's because they're not sharing any elements of their design with everything else.

When the font you choose is generally known as a cliché, has become the butt of jokes, and even has its own website dedicated to its overuse, its simply time to find a new font.

http://www.papyruswatch.com/
http://www.johnnyflash.net/the-ten-.....raphic-design/

Oh man, cracked up and/or cried a little at this <3

That's awesome, I wanna read that now.

Right???

Use it as a checklist for what not to do, haha.

Not at all the biggest fan of these guys but their logo has ALWAYS stood out to me as one of the best examples of a good use of papyrus: http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/sit.....8967/brand.gif

Fair enough! It seems a legitimate application for the font, but I think Eidy's points all still ring true for me <3

Haha, see my response to Comic Sans above <3

But yeah, basically Papyrus is super played out at the moment. Give it a couple of decades, then if you're advertising a museum exhibit on Egyptian relics, maybe, maybe use Papyrus.

I wish more people would share typography knowledge on here. Furries from what I've seen tend to be pretty horrible with using text well and this is a nice guide. :X

I feel like most furry artists are self-taught (which could be totally untrue, but that's my impression just the same), which I think works a lot better for picking up representative illustration than it does for learning graphic design and typography, where you really do need to be taught what you're even looking at and what the basic rules are before you can make sense of it. Drawing the figure is hard, but it's at least intuitive and familiar on some level; text is completely abstract.

Whiiich is why, yeah, I think you run into a lot of fandom-produced magazines and books with kind of heinous type <3

Haha yeah, You have to take the time to understand type and know what looks good and why. A lot of people I feel like for example, the ads on FA, people just put their art together then play font roulette and use whatever they get, I hate to sound like a dick but most of the ads on here are eyesores from many design perspectives but almost always a bad choice in font. I get the same impression as you though. As far as I know the majority of furries just pick up something to draw with and learn from artists they like or find tutorials on dA and while that works for illustrative technique there's never really tutorials for something essential to design like type, or design in general.

I started school for graphic design but moved shortly after and didn't actually even get to any core design classes, but it's not hard to study up without school. Graphic design is an important part of art as a whole and if people ever intend to or will need to do art that will in some degree touch upon it (digital artists that do badges and reference sheets most certainly), it doesn't hurt to creep Dafont and pick up a copy of Designing With Type or some of the Design Index books by Jim Krause.

Designing With Type is great. I would also pimp Bringhurst's "The Elements of Typographic Style."

And yeah, I think learning about how we read text is helpful for understanding things like text size/font family/color choices. A friend recently showed me a story printed in a con book that was typeset entirely in all caps. It was multiple pages of multiple columns of all caps, and it was basically unreadable. Turns out, the brain recognizes words and letter groupings by their silhouettes as opposed to reading them one letter at a time, so lowercase and mixed-case words with ascenders and descenders are much easier for us to read than MUCH MORE UNIFORM CAPITALS. Without knowing that tidbit about how we process text, I might not have been able to recognize that it might be a bad idea to set something in all caps (and certainly not why). And typography is full of lessons like that, which you really just have to be taught in order to think of them at all.

As far as font choice in FA banner ads goes, I think the author of the article I link to in the journal really hits the nail on the head when he suggests that many people look at font choice like they do music choice -- as a forum for self-expression and personal taste. Problem is, it needs to appeal broadly to everyone viewing it, while also being appropriate to the message being communicated. Super zany finicky fonts tend to fall short in those departments ^_^

Oh absolutely, they even get into that in Designing With Type, there's an example where they take a lowercase phrase and split it in half, illustrating how the upper half is more distinguishable and more easily read because of the variance in the characters (pg. 62 if you have it). To understand type you have to know that it's more than what looks cool or not, there are mechanics to the legibility and processing and like you said, having ascenders, descenders, etc definitely helps.

nice, bookmarked :3

Woo!

Very useful, I had a lot of problems looking for a good font for some logotypes and comic fonts (different to Comic Sans...I hate it). Thanks for the advice and this page will go to my bookmarks.

For sure! Hope it helps <3

this is GREAT

man i miss being in a room full of letter nerds (re: school), none of my friends CARE and just go "NO corey SHUT UP"

also, alternately: http://inspirationlab.files.wordpre.....iclarge_v2.png

Hah! Dude, that flowchart's adorable <3

And yeah, the scary thing about type nerdism is that once you start noticing type you can't ever turn it off again. You will always be that guy who sees the donut shop sign and thinks, "ALGIERS IS A STRANGE FONT FOR A DONUT SHOP SIGN " instead of "Ooh, donuts."

the closest i got to bringing my friends and family into such a level of neuroticism is teaching my mom how to identify "The Obama Font" (H&J's Gotham)

"hey, that doctor's office billboard is using The Obama Font! Look at that uppercase O!"

"that's nice, mom"

what have i wrought

Dude, I would be so proud <3

So, this is the typeface equivalent of being a TvTropes addict?

Haha, yes, in that both of them prevent you from living a normal life and both with inevitably make your friends want to staple your mouth shut at times <3

Well, I4m not up to that point yet, but... hey, I'm already using LaTeX for archiving furry stories. I'll get there soon enough.

Haha, it's like cancer: it gets everyone, eventually. Some are just lucky enough to die before it happens.


(Wow, "haha, it's like cancer" is not a phrase you often hear. Probably for good reason.)


Also, the LaTeX lion guy is so cute <3

To Serif or not to Sans Serif, that is the question.

Not much of a question, thanks to the double negative <3

I have a flowchart on bacon. It's my guide to life. I even like its font.

Bacon is good.

Yes, yes it is.

Thank you for this. <3

For shore! Although you're already a design-savvy kid

My fiance is CRAZY about fonts, so I know she'd get a kick out of this.

Nice! Haha, and my condolences that you're marrying a font nut <3

Eeeexcellent. I am a total font weenie. I've probably spent more money on fonts than on all my (non-Adobe) software combined >.>

My biggest peeve when I see signs or plates on television and such? KERNING!! AAARRGH ... LEARN HOW TO SPACE YOUR TYPE MANUALLY WHEN NEEDED, PEOPLE! *arglegarble*

Oh god, I was just at my parents' house this last weekend, and they're renovating. They had gotten a box of hardware fixtures from "Top Knobs" and I was totally aghast looking at the company's logo. It's kerning hell.

Seriously, dudes. Manual alignment

Gaaah! *runs screaming*

This goes well with Make My Logo Bigger creme,
which, if you've seen it for the tenth time, is already becoming a bit, well, Helvetica, if you know what I mean.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgcX0y1Nzhs

Regardless, I'll be referencing this on future works!

God, even after ten views, I love that infauxmercial <3

I totally need the Emotionator for my paintings.

Since I'm a comic artist and is crap at lettering, I often need to use fonts and I might need soem tip about it. I'veh ad a bit of a difficulty finding a good comic font that matches my style. The one I use now is a bit hard to read according to some people, more so on FA since the bastards resize my strips slightly.

Yeah, it really makes you respect folks like Watterson who have totally lovely hand lettering, although putting it that way probably does the man a disservice in suggesting that he was just naturally born with great lettering skills. It's something born of practice, just like any other part of cartooning (or drawing, or anything). Maybe consider cultivating your hand lettering alongside the search for some lettering fonts that work well for you?

Well, its just tedious, I'd most likely end up just doing a font out of my own handlettering and use that...

AS for fonts in general, I got an irrational fondness for Courier. Psrt of it I guess is my fondness for typewriters, otherwise I like it because of its artificial, almost "behind-the-scenes" look. Code are often written in Courier, as is scripts and other things where style isn't really a matter, just conveying the information as simply as possible.

I have a healthy respect for Courier, even if it's not a font I find attractive, personally. I think it feels too uptight to me, maybe? Like it's too wrought to be effortless or matter-of-fact (you're definitely making some statement by choosing Courier), but it's also too stodgy to look sleek or sophisticated... At this point, I think I would only use it as a nod to tradition in settings like scripts and screenplays.

But that's just me <3

This is kind of really great. I love the world of graphic design, but only ever have had one class concerning it, and that class ended up being naught but an exercise in the use of Photoshop. It was... disappointing, though it had its fun moments.

A good design class is a wonderful thing <3 It can be tough to balance instruction with allowing students to cultivate their own skills freely, but I was fortunate enough to have a couple of instructors at least put across a decent foundation to get me started ^_^

man i fucking love sm. it's like my design bible.

I've only recently started reading, but the stuff I've seen has been great!

Thanks for this, I wouldn't say I've had "trouble" picking out fonts and making presentations and other things that have some visual appeal, but it's always great to learn the rules and theory behind what works in design and why.

Totally! If nothing else, knowing why the good decisions you've been making are good will help you take educated risks and explore new territory without just going off into left field <3

For sure, there's some definite learning to be had from that.

1. Uninstall everything that isn't Comic Sans
2. Reboot computer
3. Live the dream

Oh, you <3

I've actually ended up using both Comic Sans and Papyrus, unironically, at the behest of one of my design clients. They specifically requested them, and hey, they pays the bills, so crappy fonts they got. And they were happy. I died a little inside, but freelancers gotta do what they're told sometimes.

Personally I've been stuck on Futura, Century Gothic, and Bodoni a lot lately. But I have to "go grungy" a lot for my clients, so I've been leaning pretty heavily on the beautiful retro fonts created by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society:
http://www.cthulhulives.org/toybox/.....PropFonts.html

Oh nice! Sweet link, bro

And yeah, you totally have to roll with the client's demands. As High Fontiff of the Church of Type, I absolve you of your sins.

The funkier fonts of the last few design projects I've worked on (ie, not Arial have included Interstate, Aller (Display), Quicksand (the ridiculous/adorable stitch cut), and Mrs. Eaves (Italic).

Futura has always been a favorite of mine and Wes Anderson's <3

This is great for people who aren't deep into graphic design and/or typography :)

I'd also add that people have their own likes/dislikes - ie, I personally dislike Optima, Hobo, Cooper Black, and many others but there's always appropriate/inappropriate use and I'll admit there are appropriate and inappropriate uses for all typeface. Even Comic Sans.

-K

Yeah, I think the clothing-not-music analogy he uses is very apt. Even if you don't like wearing a suit and tie, there are some occasions where you simply have to <3 Sometimes you have to rein it in, and sometimes you have to go with a font that you maybe don't like, because it's appropriate.

But we totally all have our pet fonts and our pet peeve fonts, to be sure <3

I won't decry the use of Comic Sans just because it's Comic Sans. I will however get irritated if I see, say Cooper Black or Hobo used on signage for a funeral home instead of a hot dog stand.

Slamming a typeface because of what it is and not the context isn't entirely design conscious - it's more snobbery then anything else.

I do however see poor design choices more often then not in the ads here. They're also just poor ads in general too - that's a different story for another day though ;)

You could have the most wonderfully designed ad, but if it's not worth reading, the end result is still the same : an ineffective ad. You might as well set it in dingbats at that point, at least it'd be interesting to look at (bonus points if you can tell me who did exactly that and what publication).

-K

Oh my god, if you see Hobo on a funeral home sign, I want a picture.

And you're totally right in calling font-hating in a vacuum a form of snobbery. Helvetica is no better than Hobo in the absence of any contextual cues to determine font appropriateness. Helvetica is appropriate to way more applications than Hobo, true, but still, there are cases in which Hobo is the better choice, for sure.

And hmm, I remember reading about the design firm that put a typographer wanted ad in the newspaper that was all set in dingbats. Then google wanted to tell me that David Carson set an interview with Brian Ferry in Zapf Dingbats in a '94 issue of Ray Gun magazine (thanks, google!). I'm sure there are others who've had the same idea, too!

I hope I never see one. I dare you to make one though >:D.

The design world like the art world isn't an exact science -- there are multiple correct/good solutions. I.e., if you've used Myriad, Frutiger might work as well. One solution might work better then another. I'm preaching to the choir at this point XD You already know all this.

You're correct about David Carson setting an interview in an issue of Ray Gun -- he said he read the article and said it wasn't worth reading, so he scrolled all the way to the bottom of his font menu, which in that day was, Zapf Dingbats and said "huh, at least it's interesting to look at."

My current obsessions are Gridnik from Foundry, Vitesse from Hoefler & Frere-Jones, and lastly Volvo's forbidden font: Volvo Sans (used exclusively in their vehicles and not sold.)
Rounder then Eurostile, not quite Handel Gothic, but 100% Swedish. http://typophile.com/files/001_4215.jpg

-K

Really, all of Hoefler & Frere-Jones's site sends me into fontgasmic paroxyms. It's totally type porn <3

I've grown a liking to slab serifs and aggressively angled letterforms. I had much fun making the typeface used for my logo ( http://krhainos.tk ) and improvising the Android logo typeface since the only one provided contained the letters A,N,D,R,O, and I.

Yeah, I was using Museo Slab on a project a little while back -- it's cute ^_^ I'm usually drawn to the simpler, crisper fonts, myself. There's something about a nice condensed news gothic that always makes me happy <3

I'm partial to Trade Gothic. Museo Slab is nice too! I've tried to use it on my Kindle but for some reason it doesn't like that font. :C

I love the leg on the captial R on Trade Gothic -- it's angled and goes straight to the ground -- it doesn't curl like Helvetica. Akzidenz-Grotesk is pretty sweet too.

http://www.dingo9.net/typeid.gif -- Tokyo Metro uses it to compliment the Japanese letterforms, but they've started moving to Frutiger inside the stations. External signage still seems to be Akzidenz though.

Oh man, Shinjuku Station... Haha, memories <3

Have you been?

Yeah, I've lived in Tokyo off-and-on for a few years <3

Oh, cool :D

I've been (trying) to go back every year to meet family and friends. Gotta see family while they're still alive, heh.

I usually mill around Tokyo, Odawara, Yonezawa, and Aomori :D

Ahh, yeah. Good times! I mostly roll through Tokyo-Yokohama and then down around Aichi.

Woah, good link. I've never heard the clothing analogy, and I really needed to hear it.

Yeah, I think we all do, from time to time <3

I've certainly been guilty of foisting my Pet Font Of The Hour onto clients in the past, too. The temptation is always there!

And then I learned the word "foist", so that's pretty cool.

Haha, so apparently I'm guilty of foisting my vocabulary on people as well as my font preferences <3

What perfect timing you have. I recently was delving into fonts. Thnx for the link. :D

You know it, dude <3

Have fun!

It's like I'm really back in typography class. :D Nice simple article.

A tiny bit of knowledge of the history of 'big name' fonts would also save people from the common font choice faux pas... Futura is no good for advertising. Arial loses elections. Etc.

What I need is a list of non-cheesy, contemporary-looking fonts with high readability for furry comics (where the worst fonts are always chosen, and given a 2pt white outline on a dark background).

Now if we can just get them to stop setting their type in photoshop...

Honestly, setting type in Photoshop would probably be a step up for some of the folks making zines out there. I get the sinking feeling some people are using Word, but I'm too scared of hearing that I'm right to ask...

And are you looking for a comic font, specifically, or a general-use body font?

That's actually pretty impressive, Word seems to have its own agenda entirely when you try to move anything anywhere with it.

Oh, I'll get off my own butt when I need the font! General use isn't too difficult, but finding a character neutral font that works for every scene... it's why I avoid finishing comics (something about people expecting words to be there..).

Yeah, how anyone formats anything in Word is beyond me. The thought of laying out an entire book is just... *shudder*

And I wish I could get to the point in comics where I needed to worry about lettering! Haha, I usually buckle at the "I have to draw these people how many times?" stage ^_^

If you're cool with your book having no numbering systems, images or tabs, Word is the layout program for you. Otherwise, it won't even entertain the idea of consistency.

I resent people who finish everything they start, and start everything they want to do. Where's MY slice of the motivation?

Well, we can both rest assured that I'm certainly not one of them, haha.

Ohh it could be deserve a like button. So thanks for share it !

Certainly! It's a nice summary