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AGH COMIC SANS!!!August 15th, 2011 |
Dear Ralph,
I am going to study Game Architecture and Design in a few weeks, and I received the books for this education yesterday. Your book “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” is also part of the obligatory literature. When I took a look at the book, it quickly made me deeply disappointed. The book contains text typeset in Comic Sans. Besides being ugly, the font is not intended to be used for serious messages. I won’t go into details here, but I would like to point out to you, the website http://comicsanscriminal.com/. I cannot take text printed in Comic Sans seriously, and I regret that my teachers require me to read this comic book as part of a scientific education. I hope that you (or whoever typeset the book) will choose an appropriate font next time.
Kind regards, Ruud v. A.
That would be because the book is half cartoons. The cartoons have text in Comic Sans because, well, they’re cartoons. Some of them are even actual comics with multiple panes arranged sequentially and everything.
You’ll be pleased to know that the book also has headers typeset in the comicsanscriminal-recommended (and undeniably ugly) font Basically Functional.
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I will say that “theory of fun” was an awesome book, but I liked nothing about it from a typesetting/graphic design standpoint.
But since understanding the diference between aesthetics and content is so similar to separating story from gameplay, I think reading the book is a lesson in itself!
Given that the comicsanscriminal site itself is a long series of typographical “thou shalt nots”, I’m guessing that this is in the nature of arch irony for typography geeks. It’s so hard to achieve ironic hipness when the subject at hand is fonts.
Looks like a classic example of applying a winning strategy to the wrong situation. Some people who are told to never use comic sans fail to stop and think about who should use it and under what circumstances.
I deal with people like that daily and I wouldn’t be so sure!
I am pretty sure it was a joke, to some degree, Mitch.
I’m so looking forward to when this guy releases Anal-Retentive: The Game!
Oh, wait, if he is anal-retentive I guess he won’t… release.
Some people can get worked up about just about anything. I don’t particularly like Comic Sans but it’s functional enough and I can’t even say I think it’s especially ugly. I could think of many fonts that are uglier.
As is increasingly common these days, I just don’t get what the fuss is all about.
oh boy, i can hardly wait to see what kind of fun games this guy is gonna come up with!
Harder to read fonts may help with retention.
So thanks may be in order.
http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/06/02/comic-sans-may-improve-your-reading-retention-says-study/
“Dear, Ralph …”
That never gets old.
This is rather funny, because the website itself is a joke of sorts which doesn’t use comic sans at all.
Why does no one ever follow their own rules