Comic Sans. The perfect font for an annoying day.

I’m in a bad mood. I’ve just had a couple of very frustrating hours, the culmination of which was that everything was for nothing. Back to square one. I hate that.

(“And then he died. The end.”)

One of the frustrations I’ve been living with lately has been a promise I made – and have so far not managed to keep – to write a short review of Simon Garfield’s wonderful book about fonts, Just My Type. Partly this is because I have not yet managed, months on, to finish the book. Another frustration.

But suffice for now to say that one of the more amusing (if not exactly untrodden) bits of the start of the book is its chapter on Comic Sans.

So how happy am I now. Replete with bad mood, pointlessness and frustration, seeking some slight life-affirming diversion, I stumble across this website: Comic Sans Criminal. (Note the bit at the end, where you can refer them to a Comic Sans criminal of your acquaintance.)

A couple of points to note: one, I don’t know what the typefaces on the website are. I’m not THAT good. Two, that their source code somehow cleverly bypasses the need to express that information, through use of something called Doctype which I also don’t know.  One’s ignorance increases tenfold with every question one asks.

And three, that why is it in all caps? Well, these are not block paragraph text, they are effectively headings, or poster-type text. It’s a little controversial, and you could say it’s just trendy. But it refers back to the olf music hall and circus posters, and I think it works.

You might also, if you liked that, appreciate these people, “putting the sans in Comic Sans“. (Though the whole concept is in its conception, of course, merely kitsch – the people who do it are too easy a target, and they won’t even notice. In fact, they’ll probably like it. I for one would rather put my energy into something good to look at. But still, it’s funny, and I did fleetingly think it would be fun to have their tote bag.)

Then there’s this thing, on Timothy McSweeney’s. I had read it before. I thought it was funny, but a bit too much on the unnecessarily aggressive side to adorn the halls of Baroque. But right now it fits my mood perfectly.

You don’t like that your coworker used me on that note about stealing her yogurt from the break room fridge? You don’t like that I’m all over your sister-in-law’s blog? You don’t like that I’m on the sign for that new Thai place? You think I’m pedestrian and tacky? Guess the fuck what, Picasso. We don’t all have seventy-three weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our seventeen-inch MacBook Pros. Sorry the entire world can’t all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type. Sorry some people like to have fun. Sorry I’m standing in the way of your minimalist Bauhaus-esque fascist snoozefest. Maybe sometime you should take off your black turtleneck, stop compulsively adjusting your Tumblr theme, and lighten the fuck up for once.

So don’t mess with me.

And don’t say “transition” is a verb. Just don’t do it. Okay. And if you do do it, please make sure you do it in Comic Sans. Because that’ll be the kind of person you are.

Now I’m going to go for a little walk to buy a Diet Coke, and then come back and try and achieve something BIG this afternoon. Either it happens, or I go and leave a shouty note in the kitchen. In Comic Sans.