Agreed! The x-height [0] (among other things) differs jarringly between the serif and sans fonts used.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-height#:~:text=In%20typogr....
Yes.
As others said, stylistic alternatives definitely exist in most font packages, especially commercial ones used with Adobe products. So the fact that they are not widely used outside of graphic design probably goes back to people generally hate fonts that look handwritten for anything besides wedding invitations.
The original and better case against Comic Sans was that there were much better handwritten, comic-text-style fonts and that Comic Sans was a particularly bad instance of one.
Just ask Dave Gibbons:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/aug/12/dave-gibb...
>"It's just a shame they couldn't have used just the original font, because it's a real mess. I think it's a particularly ugly letter form," he says. "The other thing that really bugs me that they've used an upper case I with bars on it: it looks completely wrong to the comic eye. And when you see store fronts done in it, it's horrible."
It's a handwritten, casual font used in inappropriate situations /and the only available for anything 'fancy' on the Average Computer used by Average Joe/.
if any of the objection is to the precise letter drawings, ok fine, give me a different one, but the overall concept, I'm Comic Sans all the way.
A warning I won't ignore is one written by a friend about something unusual or unexpected. "The supposedly insulated handle on this pot will melt your fingers off"
I just think that comic sans draws my eye in, in a way that Copperplate instructions from HR do not. Don't tell HR, or they'll start using Comic Sans.
These are fonts that are not just eye-catching, but actively painful to look at for how striking they are, to the point that they're even maybe a bit hard to read (but you still end up reading them, because it's hard to look away.) These are fonts that scream at you — fonts HR would never dare to use, even knowing they "work", because it'd be unprofessional to be that attention-grabbing. It'd be the typographic equivalent of blowing an airhorn in a small room in order to interrupt someone.
Or you can go the other way, and just put an actual picture of the grim reaper on your sign: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/58b3vj/stop_prevent_y... .
(Though actually, oddly enough, something about that typography makes me feel threatened even without the image. I think that particular tight leading with all-caps lettering using a high-weight sans-serif font, puts me in mind of specific public civic-engineering uses of typography to warn people away from high-voltage power substations, large AM radio transmitters, hydro-dam spillways, etc. It's a subtle thing, but it's enough to make it really not look like your standard HR print-out. See also: the old shield of the US Department of Civil Defense — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_defense_in_the_United_St.... Seeing that on something is just unsettling — for purely typographic reasons!)
Yes, like a clown talking to you while honking his nose. Amusing and ignorable.
You don't use it for a business letter for the same reason you don't use Times New Roman, Garamond, Baskerville, &c, for a comic.
Not sure what you're talking about; it did and there are many fonts that use it.
Why would you want that? It seems like it would be harder to read for no benefit.
call me OCD but when I look at stuff written in script my eyes check to see if all the a's are the same, all the b's are the same, all the... and then what I see is manufactured uniformity, a communique from The Machine.
it wouldn't take much variation (say, three different a's) to make me feel a sense of relief that it's warmer and cuddlier
I'm curious why type/font technology hasn't developed for variation in letters, where a handwriting or printing typeface (or "Ransom" :) could vary the letter "a" so all the "a"'s don't look alike, the same as happens irl.