A realist's guide to comic sans There are signage fonts and there are text fonts. Text fonts are designed to be read a paragraph at a time. Signage fonts are designed to be read a word at a time. Comic Sans inhabits the nether regions between the two: it was designed for Microsoft Bob, the Clippy OS. In other words, it's a signage font but was deliberately infantilized so that Microsoft's designers could say "it looks like you're trying to type a sentence but suck at computing. Can I hold your hand while you're doing that?" without feeling scolded by HAL9000. As such, it's a shitty font for readability. There's a passive-aggressiveness to its design that's deliberately designed to blunt what it says. It's also a shitty font for signage. It's designed to be partially ignored. It's even a shitty font for comics - the designer wasn't really trying for anything related to comics, but was more going for the children's-scrawl version of Futura. If you must do things in a comic font, at least use Lint McCree.
Thx kb. I'm not committed to comic anything. I just want a good clear readable font -- not for the blog particularly, but for all my course material. Of course there are other considerations besides font - there's spacing between lines and between letters. I'll pop the question over on askhubski. Some people may be irritated by the signage/clippy/childish attitude suggested by comic. My students have been mocking me for a while for using it. Since I'm creating new curriculum right now, I can change the whole book to something less irritation-provoking.
I'm limited to the font selection on my computer. When I download new (free) ones, they come with embedded stuff that screwed up some other functionalities.
I used to use a combination of Bank Gothic and Bell Gothic, and then Battlestar Galactica came out and Bank Gothic took over the universe. I tried futura for a while but it's not particularly legible; I tend to use Anonymous Pro for most things these days.