Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. Text.
The printed word. Vitally important,
but never naked. When
words and letters are printed, they have to wear the
clothing of a typeface. A font family. We don't always think of it this way, but
you cannot
type without using a typeface.
Even right now, here on YouTube, when you leave a comment,
you are communicating your own words, your own thoughts,
but through the visual styling of someone
else - the creator up Arial. In these Vsauce videos,
Jake, Kevin, myself and others use Alsina,
because it most closely resembles the handwritingof
Nik Guinta, the creator of the Vsauce
logo. Now, thinking of typefaces
as fashion for letters is not a new idea.
Adrian Frutiger famously said that the work of a type designer
is just like the work of dressmaker. Or
as Alan Fletcher put it, a typeface is an
alphabet in in a straitjacket. Some typefaces have serifs
and some don't. Some are famously neutral,
while others are silly or ugly.
But one typeface is
so silly and so ugly
and so popular that it has
arguably become the most hated font
of all time. Comic Sans. People who consider themselves
discerning designers scoff at its ubiquity,
usually wielded by amatures who
don't know better. It was recently reported that
on Twitter, the only thing complained about more often than Justin Bieber,
but less frequently than airlines, is
Comic Sans. Online you can play
a Kill Comic Sans game. And the website
Ban Comic Sans provides a gigantic
list of hand-written looking fonts that they would prefer you use
instead. Comic Sans is so hated
it's almost pulled a 360 and is
cool again, ironically. David OReilly's amazing t-shirts, for example.
But irony isn't the only thing
Comic Sans has going for it. The British Dyslexia Association considers
Comic Sans
a particularly good font for children who have trouble reading letters because
of its easily distinguishable
characters, like the letter A. For most of our history
books and signs had to be hand
written, often meticulously and expensively copied
by hand. There were no printers, no typesetters.
If you wanted a book, someone had to
literally write by hand the whole book for you.
But Gutenberg changed that by popularizing
interchangeable type. He modelled his tight pieces after the
handwriting of scribes at the time, producing what could be called
the very first font ever textura.
Later on, typesetters in Italy realized that words could be
slanted and remain legible and readable,
but take up less vertical space, so more could be printed on a single
page. That's why it's called italics. Not because
italics means slanted or oblique,
but because of where it was invented - Italy. Metal type
pieces had to be cast from molten metal
in foundries, which get their name from the French
fondue, which means something that has been melted.
And so it's because of the word fondue that we now call a collection of characters
within a typeface
a font. When setting type,
typesetters kept their type pieces in cases.
The most commonly used pieces were kept in the lower case for easy access,
whereas capitals were kept just a little above
in the upper case. Back
to Comic Sans. Comic Sans was designed in 1994
by Vincent Connare. According to the BBC,
Melinda Gates herself asked Connare to design
a font for the cartoon dog in Microsoft Bob
to speak in. And so, within three days,
Connare had designed Comic Sans, based on hand drawn fonts
from comic books. It never actually made it into the final version of
Microsoft Bob,
but was subsequently released as a font choice on so many Microsoft products
that it became what it is today. Million of amateurs now had access to this font,
which seemed simple and cute and became popular on things like homemade birthday
cards,
but also in less appropriate situations.
For instance, on an official Canadian coin
or on a gravestone.
Because of things like that, Comic Sans has amassed
a lot of haters. But it was never intended to be used
so often or in such inappropriate situations.
And so in reality, the fault may lie
with us, the typers.
Comic Sans doesn't disappoint people.
People disappoint people.
Another way to think of it is this. Discerning type aficionados
may recognize Comic Sans so quickly because
it is a threat. Type design
is a specialized discipline, but now
anybody with a computer can take a stab at it
without your approval. They don't need
you. To be sure, Comic Sans, objectively speaking,
isn't really that well designed according to the fundamentals of type
design.
David Kadavy has a brilliant explanation of this in his
"Why You Hate Comic Sans." He points out that it's
unbalanced and not very well kerned.
Comic Sans is certainly not a calculated, precise
font liked Trajan. But it's not organic, like
real handwriting. Instead, it lies within
the uncanny valley. This concept often comes up in robotics.
The more human something gets, the cuter it becomes and
the more we like it, until its almost human
but not quite. At this point, things become
creepy, almost scary. Perhaps Comic Sans
exists in that same area, typographically speaking.
But that said, the screens that Comic Sans was originally designed to appear
on,
were typically aliased, and as Kadavy points out, compared to fonts like
Garamond,
Comic Sans does really well here.
That is how we should think about Comic Sans.
A pragmatic font, a font that worked remarkably well in its
era and exists today as one of the most recognizable
relics of one of the most important design revolutions
in history. Books used to be painstakingly copied by
hand. Now later, you could design a story or an idea,
but the final look really just came down to what a
few typesetters could do. Today,
almost anyone can dabble in typography
and that is an amazing thing. Sure,
it means that Comic Sans will be used.
A lot. But as Corey Holms points out, Comic Dans
is proof the design works. The public understands that
"type means more than words."
And David Kadavy argues that just as interchangeable type
led to a spread of literacy, Comic Sans,
and the personal publishing it comes along with,
should lead us toward a spread of design
literacy.
Sure. Comic Sans is a bit
ugly. But it's ugly in the same way that the first few chords
of 'Smoke on the Water' are ugly, as
played by almost every beginning guitarist,
who picks up a guitar at almost every
instrument store. Sure, it sounds
annoying and a little bit fumbly, but it represents someone who is using
tools to move toward mastery.
Adrian Frutiger said that type has the power to make the whole world of
thought
legible, simply by rearranging the same letters
over and over again. Well, Comic Sans,
overused by the untrained majority
may seem unsavory to some people, but as such,
it most loudly represents something phenomenal.
Today it is possible for the whole world of
thought to be made legible and be shared
by the whole world.
And as always,
thanks for watching.