Sunday, April 19, 2009

Well I'll be damned.
For over ten years now in my emails, I've been using
Comic Sans MS as my standard type font.
Blue 14 point. A bit whimsical, not too formal.
That's what your actually looking at right now.
I actually picked the font by it's appearance,
not it's name. A font by any other name would still be as silly.
Actually it's a bit of a misnomer.
San serif means no serifs and this font uses serifs on the bottoms and tops of the
uppercase I. See. A trivial point however. They should call it almost Sans.
Or 98% Sans Serif. But once again I digress.
Hey, I used to be a printer in another life. 
I lived and died by the font. Back in the stone ages,
we had few choices and they were all costly.
You literally rubbed your letters, one at a time, from this waxy sheet on to
your camera ready artwork. And don't screw it up. You couldn't cut and paste back then.
Actually that's exactly what you did. Literally cut and paste.
Scissors and library paste were standard issue when setting "type" for your offset press.
That's where the term came from.
Now I see on the front page of today's WSJ that
I'm right in the line of fire of a raging controversy.
I appears that people who use Comic Sans MS are the type who would " show up
for a black-tie event in a clown costume".
Who me?
I appears some Comic Sans users are giving the rest of us stand-up types a bad name.
In my humble opinion, it seems to be a another case of persons with too much idle time on their hands. 
Now, where in the hell did I put my red rubber nose?

1 comment:

  1. Actually I'm not looking at Comic Sans because I deleted the ugly thing a few months back, haha :)

    ReplyDelete