Are there any fonts you are growing to detest?

I used to like Papyrus too but now it's the font of choice for people who want to appear 'tasteful'.

I'm beginning to hate Impact. When I took this job, one of the first things I did was decide on a house style, that we'd use for all our printed communication and promotional material and whatnot. Headline-type stuff is always in Impact, and it might be getting a little bit stale.

Exactly, it's on everybody's home-built small-business brochure.

It says "Catering." It says "Ghost Tour." It says "Interior Design Consulting."

I think I may be starting to hate copperplate. And yeah, papyrus has reached the do not love list.

Papyrus.

I like Bleeding Cowboys.

I'm growing to detest all web fonts, except Geneva.

It's well-known that Helvetica donates large amounts of money to various racist organizations.

Garamond bilked countless thousands of their life's savings during the savings and loan collapse, yet got off scott-free.

And, on a more personal note, Times New Roman shot my cousin in a botched liquor store hold-up, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.

*favourites bmarkey's comment*

neuropol. Hate, hate, hate. You see it everywhere these days, even in real life on shop signs etc.

Garamond, Trebuchet, Palatino and Franklin Gothic are just about the only non-hideous fonts you get as standard with Windows/Office. In particular, italic Garamond is a thing of beauty, if used sparingly for headings. Also, the world would be a better place if Gill Sans was more common (though we're probably better off without its designer).

Sooner or later, all of you will come home to Bookman. But will I gloat when you do? Hell yeah, I will.

(And for the record, the Veer/Jukebox version is way cooler than the ITC version and both are better than Monotype/Microsoft Office's "Old Style")

And I like the fact that somebody has designed a free font named "I Hate Comic Sans".

I detest Rotis. It's everywhere and so not cool anymore.
My wedding invitations where done in Papyrus, but this was back in 2002, so.
The new Vista fonts are quite nice, though.

I was actually going to put up a post about this on Friday and got too busy...

I am in the midst of a huge documents control project that involves (among other things) locating, re-shelving, re-arranging, sorting, labelling, re-foldering and otherwise massaging about a googleplex of quality assurance documents and MSDS files.

On Friday, I opened a large lateral file drawer only to discover that Every. Damned. Label. in there was printed in Comic Sans. Sorta the typographical equivalent of a whoopee cushion. I started laughing helplessly, which prompted the admin in the cube outside the records room to ask what was so funny.

Which left me at a loss to explain what really WAS so funny, afterall. I highly doubt she'd get it if I tried.

and yes, Virginia, I reprinted ALL the labels for that drawer... because among other things that have been hilariously busted about this project, all of their labels are supposed to be consistent with a corporate QA standard.

Once at an old job I went to great lengths to explain to my boss how trite and cliche one would appear if one used Comic Sans in the department newsletters (don't ask). I resubmitted a tastefully laid out (or so I thought) rendition, only to have her send it back with the headers (I shit you not) re-done in Playbill...

*bangs head on desk*

chewie, Copperplate has also garnered a disproportionate amount of loathe in my personal angst locker.

OK, seriously, can someone explain why Comic Sans is (apparently) such a crime against nature and humanity? Maybe I'm just being thick, but I don't understand why a simple font engenders such deep-seated laothing in so many people.

deep-seated loathing

Aw, man. Y'all got me downloading fonts again and I thought I had broken that habit.

Note: I agree with most of the above. Trebuchet is my go to font. I tend to dislike serif fonts.

why Comic Sans is (apparently) such a crime against nature and humanity?

If you have to ask...

Well, yeah, I do. It's a font. It's not like it's a serial baby-stabber or something.

It's the Colin Hunt of fonts.

Comic Sans is in the same old-and-fugly category as frames on webpages and animated gif backgrounds and the blink tag (which MetaChat wisely stripped from this comment). And when Blambot offers a dozen free comic-strip/book-style fonts that look much nicer and there are even free fonts based on the lettering of Charles Schulz and Matt Groening, it is seriously unneeded. It's just damned frustrating when the worst font in a category is the most used.

I hate Arial. I never liked it when my computer abbreviated it "New Century Schlbk" (what's a schlibbuck?), but New Century Schoolbook is growing on me since I started using it for form letters at work.

One of the grad schools I applied to last year sent their official rejection email in Comic Sans.

... why Comic Sans is (apparently) such a crime against nature and humanity?
It's so that cool hipsters have something to clearly delineate them from the herd. Don't take it away from them - for some, it's all they have.

My detestation of Comic Sans goes back at least to college, where it was one of the few more informal-looking fonts available on the computers in the lab (where we all had to go, don't you know, to do any computing, not having our own PCs for the most part, yet). So every Student Activities Center flyer, poster, Awareness Week table tent, event invitation, and swag order form ended up getting printed in Comic Sans, almost by default, since the other fonts were mostly the basic, standard ones you'd use to write your term papers in.

Thus, for me, the font became associated with a strained attempt to make the best of the small pond that was college by trying to lend your Movie Night or Funky 70s Dance Party an air of madcap, zany good-time fun.

Whenever I see it now, I feel like I'm standing back in front of the bulletin board at the Student Center, wondering what dull plateful of gray, mushy events will be presented in the coming few days.

It occurs to me that another font problem is simply due to the universality of Office Suite and the fact that for ten, fifteen years now, we've pretty much exhausted the possibilities of the standard font set. We basic word-processing desktop jockeys can self-publish and design, but we can't innovate; there's no chance we're actually going to create a new typeface. After looking at the same, un-evolving appearances on office documents and flyers and other self-published collateral, it all just starts to look tired, and I doubt that'll change until someone comes up with a blazingly new, fresh stylesheet and list of options for MS Office.

*chuckles @ lonefrontranger*

I should come clean: Against my loud and constant protestations, COMIC SANS IS STILL MY COMPANY'S PREFERRED FONT... *sobs in frustration*

I have been told, over and over, that it's the only standard Windows font that dyslexics can easily read.

When I first got there, they were using this shit called Dom Casual, which had to be installed... so we were sending the font out to clients! I put a stop to that but was railroaded into comic sans world. DO NOT WANT.

Can someone please tell me that this dyslexia thing is a lie so I can talk the new owners into flushing it for something less godawful?

Comic sans is something I don't use or really like, but I likewise do not understand the apparent depth of hate for it.

There really aren't any fonts I completely love or hate. Every font has its uses; it's inappropriate use of a particular typeface that gets my goat. At work, I decided years ago (probably in 1998) that our default font for all printed materials would by Trebuchet. It works pretty well. I've always liked Adobe Minion for serif, Adobe Myriad for sanserif. I'm glad that the mid-to-late-'90s fad of degraded, deformed or "cyberpunk" fonts for otherwise serious titles or headings seems to have run out of steam.

I think that the first place I saw Papyrus was on the mid-'90s update of TSR's D&D Dark Sun campaign materials. It worked at the time, but the amount of current use and repetition does kind of make it less interesting.

I like fonts; that Bleeding Cowboy is nifty. Comic Sans is just way overdone, and Papyrus is getting there. I love that anybody can make tidy labels, signs, and all sorts of stuff that used to require major hassles. There's now a gahillion tools for graphic design easily available, and sadly, they don't come with graphic design training, experience, talent or taste. I totally include myself in that. I try to keep my font usage low-key, but I can't resist downloading all the groovy fonts, and sneaking them into use.

Comic Sans? Dyslexics? That had the ring of BS to it, so I looked around. What I found was that indeed, Comic Sans is one of the fonts that dyslexics seem to find easier to read, because the letterforms for things like q and p look quite distinct. From the British Dyslexia Association:

Fonts should be rounded, allow for space between letters, reflect ordinary cursive writing and be 'easy on the eye'. Look for a font that spaces letters rather than running them closely together. Bear in mind that fonts that have unusual shaped letters can create difficulties.

* Select sans serif fonts such as Arial or Comic Sans. Other suggestions include Verdana, Helvetica, Tahoma, Trebuchet and Sassoon.

But some sites note that Comic Sans can be considered "too childish" or "too informal" and recommend the use of some of these other fonts. Here's another.

One more opinion:

Commonly used fonts for this purpose are Arial, Comic Sans, Verdana, Helvetica, Tahoma and Trebuchet. It is important to note that not every dyslexic user dislikes serif fonts: many have no problem with them provided the line spacing is sufficient.

So a quick look around seems to suggest that while Comic Sans is indeed a highly readable font with distinct letterforms and comfortable spacing for dyslexics, there are other choices which are as good or better. Perhaps you're not locked into it, chuckdarwin.

*I am a font lover myself. I'm constantly downloading retro and Western fonts, in particular. I love fonts too. I'm just getting tired of the standard ones and the standard 'alternative'-'I'm trying to be artsy' ones.

I never understood the whole let's adopt Arial movement. Times New Roman is easier to fecking read and format.

I must confess I like verdana better than arial or times as generic web fonts go, actually. Feels a little friendlier to read.

I must confess that I have a fondness going way back for Bitstream Charter. It was the first non-"standard" typeface available to us WordPerfect mavens back in the DOS days. I'm sure it's been improved on in many ways (I like most of the Vista faces, for example), but it was just so rare to be able to use something that elegant. I begged more than one client to buy the Bitstream add-on just because of Charter.

Comic Sans, now. I fully understand the intellectual objection but I can't raise my ire as high.

Comic sans is the font equivalent of embedding Precious Moments clip art into your document. Which is to say it's sickeningly sappy, faux-childish, rarely appropriate for the project at hand, and always hard to take seriously. Use at your discretion.

I love Mrs. Eaves and Dalliance, though they're both over-used.

Bleeding Cowboy is so hot. Love it.
I would also like to note that I had Papayrus on my geocities page back in like 1998, and Neuropol on my blog in like 2002.

So everyone needs to quit copying me or I swear to god we'll all be seeing some bubble font in five years everywhere we go.