Comic Sans. The fly in my soup, the hair in my coffee, the worm in my apple, the fetid sore on my right calf... I really don't like comic sans. This is a feeling I have built up over the last four years. Doing my design course has opened my eyes to the atrocities of the home office 'artist' and more specifically the role Microsoft has played in the creation of bloody awful design. Lets take a moment to peek at the activities of one such artist and his or her valiant attempts at poster creation.

They open up MS Word, or if they are more upper class than that, they may have MS Publisher, find a lovely clip art graphic of kids running with balloons created in the mid 1980's and drop that in. In the centre. In the very centre. Next they drop in their text. Not any old text, but the heading. They drop it onto the page at the top -because that's where headings go- and centred. They give it a funky shape, in this case, it's a school fete, so we'll make the text look like a fish becasue we like fish... By now our little home office artist is feeling quite pleased with themselves. They have a nice centred graphic and an equally nice centred heading in the shape of a fish. The poster is complete! Well, almost. There is something not altogether right with the heading. Now the program they are using chose Arial Black by default, but it just doesn't seem fun enough. Scroll through a few of the other fonts here... Courier... nup too dull. Times... nup, too old. Webdings... nup, that only makes pictures. Oh look, here's one called Comic Sans, it's about comics! It must be fun! I'll use that.

Instantly what was already a monstrosity has evolved into a much more devilish creation. Not only has it lost any sense of style and sophistication, it now instantly reads as cheap and nasty, even if they photocopy it onto the pink, blue and yellow Reflex Tints paper! Colour can't help this situation.

This is not why I detest Comic Sans, in fact, I like Comic Sans for the simplicity of critique it offers. When Comic Sans is used, a design is instantly recognisable as average and in turn the designer -it can be assumed- has little to no typographic knowledge or skill.

This is why, when I see it used in commercial situations, I cringe. I feel the anger building up in my head. I feel the blood rushing through my ears. If someone has paid a 'professional' designer to go out and design them something, and it comes back looking like a great steaming pile of dog poo in all its' Comic Sans'ed glory, I feel that a great wrong has been done. It's comparable to taking your car to the mechanic to have him or her fill the petrol tank with chocolate sprinkles and paint the windows orange. It is simply unprofessional. Yet they do it, and they do it without any regard for what Comic Sans has grown to mean and that is; cheap and nasty home publishing.

So please, if you are a designer of anything be it film, literature, brochures, toilet paper or school projects, avoid Comic Sans. Under no circumstance can it be assumed to be classy. Its name has been forever spoiled by the ill-fated attempts of home publishers around the world. Let us bury it, and move on.