Friday, April 17, 2009

WHEN ZAPF DINGBATS IS NOT SOLEMN ENOUGH: Nice hard-hitting piece on the front page of the Wall Street Journal today about typography's international bad-boy star font, Comic Sans, and the movement to ban it (if the link tells you you need to register, just go to news.google.com and search for "comic sans"; you'll get a link that should work). Created on a lark 15 years ago to give people appropriate lettering for cartoon thought or dialogue bubbles, Comic Sans has become the typographical equivalent of the misused quotation mark, popping up in inappropriate places like a Black Sabbath fan site and the marquee of a Spanish opera house.

Given that it's still impossible to kill Clippy, I don't understand why Microsoft, the font's owner, couldn't just end hostilities by embedding a pop-up warning: "This font should be used only in juvenile literature or to connote juvenile literacy." Presumably, that would prevent people from using it for their funeral notices.

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