This week The Wall Street Journal profiled Comic Sans, the font designers love to hate. It's an interesting article that gives designer Vincent Connare a chance to point out why he created it in the firs place. Microsoft was making a fun, bouncy product for children and the on-screen dialogue of a helpful assistant was being rendered in Times New Roman. Context faaaaail.

Designer @markboulton today poked his head out of the #d7ux Drupal redesign trenches to comment on the typeface. I've tried to pull together a chain of tweets into a unified quote:

Am I the only designer to think that Comic Sans is NOT an ugly/bad typeface? Its usage should be specific, but it's been abused, that's all. The reason it has been used so much is that it does a very, very good job at communicating values: fun, friendly, childlike, innocent....

Good typographic design is about context, right? Comic Sans on important signage is bad, but on a kids invitation? Comic Sans (incorrect) usage is a result of not giving users the right tools to make good design decisions. Simply having a font dropdown in Word means anyone can use it to do bad things with. So, why not give them better tools?

It's the victim of ordinary people making uniformed design decisions.

Well put, I think. There are better fonts than Comic Sans for comic lettering, but that's not what most designers are complaining about when they slag on it. They see people putting a lemonade stand font on corporate emails, and they shudder. It's important to remember that Garamond looks pretty silly on a lemonade stand, too.

Meanwhile, Mark Pilgrim rants about type foundries and their impact on the state of embedded web fonts. He titles his post "Fuck The Foundries." That captures the spirit of it pretty nicely.

Let me put it another way. [Commercial] Fonts are superior to [Open] Fonts in every conceivable way, except one:
WE CAN'T FUCKING USE THEM.

He argues that typography will suffer from the same gnawing-at-the-margins effect that proprietary CMS vendors suffer in a world of Open Source Software. Their stuff may start better, but an army of people tweaking, polishing, and giving away can very quickly close the gap until the difference is indistinguishable.

While we wait for browsers to catch up with font embedding, there are a couple of groups that could evolve into ad-hoc 'Open Foundries' for embeddable fonts. Yum. @emmajanedotnet and I are already trading font stories -- If I'm not careful I could get sucked into type fetishism again.

Also? Business cards made of meat. Yes.