Should I Get Myself Another Hobby?

To be fair, the complete quote from Mr. Connare is:

If you love it, you don’t know much about typography and if you hate it you really don’t know much about typography either and you should get another hobby.

and can be found on his personal website.

Of course, I’m very tempted to write something sarcastic and mean about the utter disregard to user friendliness and sense of design behind that particular website, but as I’ve come to understand from his 2002 letter on the Microsoft Typography website – he tends to take things a bit personally, so I won’t.

Instead I’ll address Mr. Connare’s claim, that if you hate Comic Sans, you should basically go find yourself another hobby.

I assume that Connare is referring to the basic principle that “there is no bad typeface, only bad uses of it.” And yes, most typefaces do have one use that they may be suited for. However – that doesn’t make Comic Sans a good typeface!

Let’s just make it clear what the purpose of Comic Sans is: it was originally made for use in speech bubbles in Microsoft Bob. It was designed to be used with furry cartoon animals, for speech bubbles.

But even for that specific task, which was what it was made to do – Comic Sans is not the perfect fit. And when Connare in 1997 tries to convince the world that Comic Sans is a ‘groovy typeface’ which is ‘great for titles’ and a ‘useful text face’ – he really pushes it!

First off: Comic Sans is mimicking handwritten text. Which is a difficult task in and of itself. Mainly because, in most low-quality typefaces, every ‘e’ will look the same. When Gutenberg did the same thing over five hundred years ago, he made over 30 versions of the lowercase ‘e’, to be able to mix things up a bit.

The reason most typefaces today doesn’t have 30 different lowercase ‘e’-glyphs, is of course that printed Serif type no longer tries to mimic handwriting. But Comic Sans does. And as such it should contain, if not 30, then at least two different versions of the most common of glyphs. At least if you’re going to market it as a text face!

Even good italic typefaces (which also is supposed to mimic handwriting) has varying glyphs.

Aside from doing a poor job at mimicking handwriting, Comic Sans has several other problems. It has an incredibly skewed baseline, which makes you seasick if you try to read any more than a sentence of it, it is utterly inconsistent and unbalanced in its strokes, the kerning is kind of odd, and it has an oversized x-height that doesn’t come close to suiting the typeface at large…

You may clammer to the hope that someone may find the perfect use for your typeface, Mr. Connare, but the fact of the matter is, it is just a badly drawn typeface. You see, I’m not criticizing the many teachers and soccer moms using Comic Sans, or even the English coach line that uses it as its logo font painted on the side in half meter lettering. I’m not even criticizing you, Mr. Connare. I’m criticizing Comic Sans. And if you cannot see why, then may I suggest you be the one finding yourself another hobby.