Overused/Overplayed. Legible/Catchy. Well crafted for its original purpose. Gets no respect. Probably deserves a little, but it makes you feel dirty to give it.
Comic Sans has no ambition; is chosen despite itself; is hyper-ordinary.
It’s the supermarket’s-own-brand ramen noodles of typefaces.
Same as every crack addict on a come down, surely?
I'm not sure if Britney Spears had pushy parents, but I think that's the analogy with Comic Sans. Abusively pushy and demeaning, trying to criticise when the flaws are those of the beholder and bestowing outrageous praise for imaginary achievements.
I'm glad to hear solid defence of Comic Sans here because whatever it is, it's sui generis, unto itself true. Which I think is the most attractive character trait at the same time as provoking extreme reactions of self projection in observers.
If you have a product that doesn’t target designers or the like, does it really matter?
Maybe Carol Burnett.
Classic example: Futura.
Modern examples:
Apple fonts: Monaco uses both single-storey "a" and "g"; San Francisco uses single-storey "g" by default, and includes single-storey "a" in stylistic sets.
The Adobe Source (Code, Sans) and IBM Plex (Sans, Serif, Mono) font families include both single-storey "a" and "g" as alternate glyphs accessible through OpenType stylistic sets.
Edit: not that comic sans is a bad choice I’ve just been working on things related to this and found that other font
So who exactly is the more petty? People getting irritated by a typeface, or people getting irritated over those people?
Maybe it's because they're both tacky?
People who dislike it aren't trying to show off the "2 or 3 things that have learned on typography", they are simply not blind and can see its ugliness.
But apparently people got offended when I've said that there's no need to be an architect to understand that Vegas has no architectural value...
There's no special quality that makes comic sans good if you look close enough, it's just bad, 20 dollars WiFi router bad, LIDL shoes bad, IKEA lack table bad, Caesar Palace Forum shop bad, something that looks okeish from afar but that's not even good enough for casual use.
Nobody would live and raise a family in a Treasure Island hotel room, nobody would seriously use comic sans to write code and look at it 8+ hours a day.
Partly because I feel like this is such an easy target, and people who have just learned 2 or 3 things about typography are very keen on bashing Comic Sans to show off their newly acquired knowledge.
Partly because, let's face it, it's not that bad. What it does, it does well, it's pretty legible, no glyph stands out from the general harmony, etc.
There's a reason it became massively used. It was included in windows because it was part of Microsoft Chat, which back then was heavily comic book styled, with speech bubbles for messages etc (something that has since then become a standard in IM). It appeared in the font drop-down list, and people picked it when they wanted their message to look a bit informal, not too severe. Of course, someone with design knowledge is able to achieve this without resorting to this specific font (or even a funny font), but most people lack this knowledge.