Yep, this is a status thing, but it's a really odd one.

If you come to apply to a job, and your resume is Comic Sans, you're wearing torn-up clothes, you haven't had a bath in a while, and your English is sub-par? I'm going to make some inferences about your ability to do the job based on the status signalling you're giving me.

But in this case, the person providing the information is, obviously, the one offering the favor. He is, in fact, providing information that the consumer wants to consume. So it's his complete decision how to do that. After all, he's not asking a favor of the audience, and if they want to discount the information based on a font choice? That says a lot more about them than it does about him.

Reminds me of "eye dialect", where an author chooses to purposefully mis-spell words in order to show dialect and have a more emotional impact on the speaker. Many readers hate that stuff. Sometimes I find it really annoying. But heck, that's art. Man wants to spend an hour telling you about something important, you either get past the font choice or go somewhere else.

Weird thing, font snobs. It's like they don't have anything better to complain about, so they just search around for whatever they can find.

I don't think it's a matter of status so much as an issue of "typeface credibility" -- Comic Sans says "what's written in this font shouldn't be taken seriously." Serif fonts are on the "serious" end of the credibility spectrum, sans fonts are in the centre, and then "fun" fonts like CS occupy the "not serious" end.

This isn't a bad thing -- the pre-association people have for different classes of fonts make it easier to convey messages in branding and marketing. It makes us distinguish between stories in newspapers and magazines (which we should remember) from frivolity that we could easily forget. With fonts, the medium is a significant part of the message.

Depends how you use it. When someone uses a font like Comic Sans sparingly, you can infer there's something special about this text. That maybe, this particular snippet is either a joke, or an informal formulation, or an XKCD quote. It can indeed be the author signalling that this snippet should not be taken very seriously.

But if the font is used by default, you cannot reasonably infer credibility from it. If the whole thing feels less credible or less serious anyway, then it's a status issue.

It's like someone showing up to give a talk with a Hitler hairstyle and toothbrush moustache. There's nothing wrong with the hair or the moustache per se, and perhaps they are your favourite for some reason, but the pre-associations will be distracting to people.

And now I'll Godwin myself out.

Serif fonts aren't more credible than San serif fonts. Serif fonts are great for lots of paragraph based text, san serif fonts are better for titles and shorter passages...and also code.

Fun fonts can be serif or sans, and are generally more artistic and ad oriented.

On screens you are right.

But on paper, with much higher resolution, serif looks more serious.

Sans often appears on signage, especially in Europe, where it works very well.

> And I don't see why we should

There is general negativity towards the idea of making assumptions based on appearances; but if we collectively decide that appearance is meaningless, don't we lose the useful ability to send intentional messages using appearances?

ie in this instance, if we stop associating comic sans with silliness, will we then have to <silly>decorate our sentences with XML tags</silly>?

(See also: people who dress in goth clothing then complain when strangers assume they are into goth culture)

I'm not sure that's it. Using anime and geek references in a presentation to 'the suits' is going to be jarring and either missed or frowned upon, but using it amongst devs is perfectly accepted. It fits the mold of a status issue. Comic sans, though, would likely receive a -worse- reception amongst those technically inclined, because we've been implicitly trained not to use it by seeing how it's talked about (on places like Hacker News). In fact, making a big deal about it seems -exactly- the sort of thing that happens amongst the low status people; designers balking at it being unprofessional, and devs balking because we like to nitpick (it's like finding a misspelled word in the slides).

It might be related to status, but in that case it's complicated; the low status people are looking for ways to appear high status (avoid comic sans), or ways to make others appear low status (eww, look, he used comic sans), whereas the high status people want to protect the integrity of status; a low status person using comic sans is likely viewed a bit patronizing ('well he's a dev; they don't know any better'), and another high status person would be more likely to be defended for the choice, if not have it outright ignored ('the content is what's important; he was just having a bit of fun').