sleeping with the enemy

I have read with much amusement the critique of Comic Sans trending the web this past year.
Seems the goofy and seemingly hated typeface has had to endure the
wrath of typographers and designers as they emphatically flipped it the typographic bird over and over again. Over the years, I too, have been guilty of reviling it's ridiculous inclusion amongst my much beloved font families while relentlessly scrolling drop-down menus. Like other useless default fonts of the Mac Operating System (Rosewood, Dakota Handwriting, Papyrus and countless awkward others), fonts like Comic Sans simply become filler between the respected fonts of savy- & purchased-choice. What we refuse to see cannot hurt us sort-of-thing.




So what happens when you are forced to look? You either run… or get over it. After suggesting to initiate an annual yearbook for my daughter's kindergarten, I found myself having to work with this outcast font as part of the Kindergarten's stipulated CI. I did manage to reduce widespread use and sneak in a sober Franklin Gothic as body text partner and left the naive waif work it's childlike magic in the headings. I had many moments when reviewing the layout where I wondered to myself just how low had I sunk, looking over my shoulder to see if anybody was, in fact, watching.



Though now, three yearbooks later, I have resolved myself to believe that using Comic Sans was not all that heretic. I am no longer embarrassed or repentive. The font (o.k., quite predictably) works well to communicate childhood activities and events. It's warm and friendly character was as carefully & systematically crafted by Vincent Connare as other more acceptable fonts by their respective designers – that it was originally designed for a user-fiendly tutorial Microsoft software and not widespread typographic use results in it's overwhelming rejection by the type community.

So, let's see, what will be my next adversary… Braggadocio?