this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
490 points (100.0% liked)
Programming
568 readers
1 users here now
All things programming and coding related. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There were legitimate reasons from a design standpoint. It's badly balanced, the spacing is inconsistent...and it was everywhere.
Funny enough, I suspect what makes it a badly designed font might be why some people with dyslexia have an easier time reading with it. The badly balanced, poor spacing, probably made the letters in the font more distinguishable from one another.
If you (or anyone else that's interested) have the time, I think this article, "Why You Hate Comic Sans," goes over all of it pretty well.
I've heard that too - part of the issue with dyslexia is that it's easy to flip the letters around in your head, when none of the letters look the same, it makes it easier to read. Open Dyslexia is another one that does something similar.
I recently read a review of 1990s pop aesthetics, and it was probably intentional for reasons that resonate with us again. In the 90s, with the advent of omnipresent computers, organic, amateurish handwriting became really popular, and I think that's what comic sans is good at looking like.