Piddle on Papyrus

I don't have a professional graphics background. But through my work with books and printed matter, I've come to notice type.

And ever since I first started noticing it everywhere, the Papyrus font has set my teeth on edge. Trust me—in 10 or 20 years anything in Papyrus is going to look atrociously dated, in the same way that certain typefaces from the 70s scream of that era. It already looks dated.

And then there's Comic Sans. In order to better understand what it is, exactly, that makes Comic Sans so upsetting to so many, I googled "comic sans sucks." I got 30,900 hits. I discovered there is even a Ban Comic Sans web site.

Comic Sans is used so much, and so often inappropriately, that it has become a cliché. It was based on the writing in comic books and developed for balloon captions for a Microsoft children's program. Most comic book writers don't even actually use it. They use other comic fonts.

I hadn't realized, but quickly discovered, that lots of people loathe Papyrus too. In fact, "papyrus sucks" gets 1,090,000 hits on Google. There are even a few anti-Papyrus groups on Flickr and blogs devoted to hating Papyrus. It's rather gratifying to realize other people share one's own pet peeves.

As I say, I'm not a graphic designer, but I can appreciate the sentiment...


Graphic Avenger.