This is why you shouldn’t use Comic Sans.
Errol Morris published a quiz in the New York Times that was supposed to test whether one was a pessimist or an optimist. But it wasn’t really about pessimism or optimism, it was about the effect of fonts on credulity. Apparently certain fonts are more believable than others.
We all know that we are influenced in many, many ways — many of which we remain blissfully unaware of. Could fonts be one of them? Could the mere selection of a font influence us to believe one thing rather than another? Could fonts work some unseen magic? Or malefaction?
Read Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth (Part 1) in the NYT.
Reminds us of the first issue of Flip. Response to the content was largely positive, but readers LOATHED Times New Roman with a passion.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
August 11th, 2012 at 12:10
If fonts have voices they will sound like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmpQiJ4wCw4&feature=plcp
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM5lWrzm9n4&feature=plcp
August 11th, 2012 at 22:29
Very interesting. Too bad Baskerville isn’t one of the font options in Yahoo Mail. But Garamond, another antique font, is — I’ll make that my default.
There’s Baskerville in MS Word though — I’ll use that. The credibility of my memos should shoot up henceforth!
August 13th, 2012 at 23:43
Oh man… i love comic sans…
August 25th, 2012 at 03:25
I used to play around with fonts (yes, Comic Sans included). One day I just got sick of Comic Sans. I can’t stand comic sans — or scripted fonts. Takes email professionalism down a notch.
Times New Roman I don’t care much of, despite the fact that my school/university sort of wanted to mandate that when writing school papers. I just thought it was overused.
I did do software coding for a while, and narrowed my font favorites down to Arial, Franklin Gothic Medium, and a few of the serif-ed ones (i.e. Cambria). I prefer Arial (8pt) or Verdana (8pt) with Excel spreadsheets, and Courier New (no larger than 10pt) for text editors.
Yeah — I admit I am pretty anal with my fonts.