It is fairly well established that Comic Sans, the font designed to look like it popped off the page of a vintage comic book, may be the most roundly despised font of all time. Designers hate it. Office workers hate it. There’s psychological research into the aversion and even a movement to ban it.
But at least one prominent social justice warrior now wants you to know that if you can’t handle Comic Sans, that probably means you’re an elitist and worse, someone who hates disabled people.
You see, Comic Sans was originally designed for a failed desktop management system called Microsoft Bob, and the font was intended to maximize readability when placed into “thought bubbles.” In Bob, a cartoon dog would guide users through various aspects of the program, and he needed a fun, readable way to communicate, even in small spaces.
Features of Comic Sans that make it discernible text even when shrunk down, it turns out, also are handy for people who are dyslexic. They can use features of the font to better discern words.
Typical people might think, well, that’s lovely. The font I’ve come to hate when used on signs commanding me not to eat some yogurt in my office fridge actually has a use that makes it slightly less horrifying.
The Establishment’s Lauren Hudgens, however, believes that hatred of Comic Sans, which no one realized was useful until now, belies a deep-seeded aversion to—and even, perhaps a clean hatred of—people who have learning disabilities.
“The ongoing joke about the idiocy of Comic Sans is ableist,” she whines. And her sister, who suffers from dyslexia, chimes in, “It’s belittling and condescending,” calling the complaints “elitist.”
This is because, Hudgens says, “the gatekeepers of graphic-design decency routinely mock those who use it as artistically stunted and uneducated.” Her sister, she claims has been told that using Comic Sans, even with her disability, is “unprofessional. That it’s juvenile. That it’s stupid. That it basically shouldn’t be used for anything at all, unless it is a comic.”
Even Dyslexic.com, they point out, suggests 10 other fonts before getting to Comic Sans, because it’s childish.
It is true, of course, that Comic Sans’s critics often believe people who use it are trapped in simpler time when the little floppy disk at the top of MS Word’s toolbar referred to a real thing. Comic Sans rode the wave of desktop publishing; it was one of the first “alternative fonts” anyone could use in word processing, and we all fell madly in love.
Most of the people who hate it now, though, aren’t angry because it appeals to people with disabilities, but rather because it’s just kind of stupid.
For Hudgens and her sister, Comic Sans acceptance is not just a task, its a crusade. Anything less of full Comic Sans acceptance and a complete reversal of numerous campaigns to eradicate the font from the digital face of the planet demonstrates a clear hatred of dyslexics, the learning disabled, and probably the disabled as a whole.
