The printed word. Vitally important,

but never naked. When

words and letters are printed, they have to wear the

clothing of a typeface. A font family. We don't always think of it this way, but

you cannot

type without using a typeface.

Even right now, here on YouTube, when you leave a comment,

you are communicating your own words, your own thoughts,

but through the visual styling of someone

else - the creator up Arial. In these Vsauce videos,

Jake, Kevin, myself and others use Alsina,

because it most closely resembles the handwritingof

Nik Guinta, the creator of the Vsauce

logo. Now, thinking of typefaces

as fashion for letters is not a new idea.

Adrian Frutiger famously said that the work of a type designer

is just like the work of dressmaker. Or

as Alan Fletcher put it, a typeface is an

alphabet in in a straitjacket. Some typefaces have serifs

and some don't. Some are famously neutral,

while others are silly or ugly.

But one typeface is

so silly and so ugly

and so popular that it has

arguably become the most hated font

of all time. Comic Sans. People who consider themselves

discerning designers scoff at its ubiquity,

usually wielded by amatures who

don't know better. It was recently reported that

on Twitter, the only thing complained about more often than Justin Bieber,

but less frequently than airlines, is

Comic Sans. Online you can play

a Kill Comic Sans game. And the website

Ban Comic Sans provides a gigantic

list of hand-written looking fonts that they would prefer you use

instead. Comic Sans is so hated

it's almost pulled a 360 and is

cool again, ironically. David OReilly's amazing t-shirts, for example.

But irony isn't the only thing

Comic Sans has going for it. The British Dyslexia Association considers

Comic Sans

a particularly good font for children who have trouble reading letters because

of its easily distinguishable

characters, like the letter A. For most of our history

books and signs had to be hand

written, often meticulously and expensively copied

by hand. There were no printers, no typesetters.

If you wanted a book, someone had to

literally write by hand the whole book for you.

But Gutenberg changed that by popularizing

interchangeable type. He modelled his tight pieces after the

handwriting of scribes at the time, producing what could be called

the very first font ever textura.

Later on, typesetters in Italy realized that words could be

slanted and remain legible and readable,

but take up less vertical space, so more could be printed on a single

page. That's why it's called italics. Not because

italics means slanted or oblique,

but because of where it was invented - Italy. Metal type

pieces had to be cast from molten metal

in foundries, which get their name from the French

fondue, which means something that has been melted.

And so it's because of the word fondue that we now call a collection of characters

within a typeface

a font. When setting type,

typesetters kept their type pieces in cases.

The most commonly used pieces were kept in the lower case for easy access,

whereas capitals were kept just a little above

in the upper case. Back

to Comic Sans. Comic Sans was designed in 1994

by Vincent Connare. According to the BBC,

Melinda Gates herself asked Connare to design

a font for the cartoon dog in Microsoft Bob

to speak in. And so, within three days,

Connare had designed Comic Sans, based on hand drawn fonts

from comic books. It never actually made it into the final version of

Microsoft Bob,

but was subsequently released as a font choice on so many Microsoft products

that it became what it is today. Million of amateurs now had access to this font,

which seemed simple and cute and became popular on things like homemade birthday

cards,

but also in less appropriate situations.

For instance, on an official Canadian coin

or on a gravestone.

Because of things like that, Comic Sans has amassed

a lot of haters. But it was never intended to be used

so often or in such inappropriate situations.

And so in reality, the fault may lie

with us, the typers.

Comic Sans doesn't disappoint people.

People disappoint people.

Another way to think of it is this. Discerning type aficionados

may recognize Comic Sans so quickly because

it is a threat. Type design

is a specialized discipline, but now

anybody with a computer can take a stab at it

without your approval. They don't need

you. To be sure, Comic Sans, objectively speaking,

isn't really that well designed according to the fundamentals of type

design.

David Kadavy has a brilliant explanation of this in his

"Why You Hate Comic Sans." He points out that it's

unbalanced and not very well kerned.

Comic Sans is certainly not a calculated, precise

font liked Trajan. But it's not organic, like

real handwriting. Instead, it lies within

the uncanny valley. This concept often comes up in robotics.

The more human something gets, the cuter it becomes and

the more we like it, until its almost human

but not quite. At this point, things become

creepy, almost scary. Perhaps Comic Sans

exists in that same area, typographically speaking.

But that said, the screens that Comic Sans was originally designed to appear

on,

were typically aliased, and as Kadavy points out, compared to fonts like

Garamond,

Comic Sans does really well here.

That is how we should think about Comic Sans.

A pragmatic font, a font that worked remarkably well in its

era and exists today as one of the most recognizable

relics of one of the most important design revolutions

in history. Books used to be painstakingly copied by

hand. Now later, you could design a story or an idea,

but the final look really just came down to what a

few typesetters could do. Today,

almost anyone can dabble in typography

and that is an amazing thing. Sure,

it means that Comic Sans will be used.

A lot. But as Corey Holms points out, Comic Dans

is proof the design works. The public understands that

"type means more than words."

And David Kadavy argues that just as interchangeable type

led to a spread of literacy, Comic Sans,

and the personal publishing it comes along with,

should lead us toward a spread of design

literacy.

Sure. Comic Sans is a bit

ugly. But it's ugly in the same way that the first few chords

of 'Smoke on the Water' are ugly, as

played by almost every beginning guitarist,

who picks up a guitar at almost every

instrument store. Sure, it sounds

annoying and a little bit fumbly, but it represents someone who is using

tools to move toward mastery.

Adrian Frutiger said that type has the power to make the whole world of

thought

legible, simply by rearranging the same letters

over and over again. Well, Comic Sans,

overused by the untrained majority

may seem unsavory to some people, but as such,

it most loudly represents something phenomenal.

Today it is possible for the whole world of

thought to be made legible and be shared

by the whole world.

And as always,

thanks for watching.