Comic Sans* just got a serious upgrade

[@LinusBoman]

Sign up for my newsletter buttondown.email/linus - first issue to go out by the end of the year, and read the full story behind Shantell Sans at shantellsans.com/ Wishing you all happy holidays and great 2024!

[@wich1]

Answer (no s) in Progress

[@alexst.pierre5956]

This newsletter has made me disproportionately excited. Thank you for the early Christmas present.

[@Raymi20-]

[MEGAMIND MEME] No Balsamiq Sans?

[@tomaspereira4797]

"Funeral Expenses" written in comic sans is pure comedy

[@amicaaranearum]

“We put the ‘fun’ in ‘funeral’!”

[@Cow-Moth-With-A-CRT-Head]

comedy sans

[@JamieBainbridge]

They picked the right font then!

[@NautilusMusic]

It looks like it's a finance page in a hypothetical "Funeral Home Tycoon" game. Gotta spend those simoleons

[@IPutFishInAWashingMachine]

HAHA SANS UNDRRTAL MEGALOVANIA

[@halbarroyzanty2931]

With how faceless and corporate the world can be, seeing a crappy design that missuses comic sans, it feels very human. I feel a connection with the person who didn't know what they were doing but tried their best regardless.

[@HERTZZBR]

good desing can feel human and actually look unironicaly beautiful, but i get what you mean

[@mokithepepe2454]

@@HERTZZBR mediocre design feels inhuman and impersonal though

[@room34]

Going back to the Microsoft Bob origins... the low-res, aliased bitmap version of Comic Sans doesn't really look that bad. I think the problem with Comic Sans is making it a printable vector version. It didn't upscale well.

[@blaholtzen]

Yes! That is where it really shines!

[@PeepsThatDoStuff]

Was waiting for this to get mentioned in the video. It is SO much better in low resolution

[@YellowYoshi398]

Completely agree, Comic Sans was my favorite font for MS Paint comics precisely because of how good the small (8-12 pt) raster versions of it looked in Windows 98-XP.

[@stevieinselby]

That's what makes it a product of its time. It worked well back in the days when you could see every pixel on the screen, when 8-bit colour and 1024×768 was bleeding edge tech and anti-aliasing just wasn't a thing. More sophisticated fonts often look terrible under those conditions. But the world has moved on so far from those early days!

[@itsPenguinBoy]

It never needed to be that bold in its default weight.

[@MikkoOittinen]

Italians love Comic Sans! On one trip I even found a hospital with the "Emergency Room" sign outside the building in Comic Sans. Rome basically has two typefaces: Roman and Comic Sans.

[@Dragoonmaster999]

IDK about that!

[@MFBjosejuFanNumberUan2047]

@@Dragoonmaster999 are you italian?

[@DefauIt-User]

@@MFBjosejuFanNumberUan2047 no he is not, he just assumes that everyone in the world has the exact same opinion as him, because OBVIOUSLY his opinions are the best.

[@icecube-n2d]

​@@DefauIt-Useromg how tf does the GD community spread across all of youtubd

[@oddbush]

lobotomy this man above me@@DefauIt-User

[@freekboy658]

Linus Boman x Answer In Progress is the crossover I never knew we needed. I do wish that more videos about Comic Sans would discuss its most appropriate use ever, in Microsoft Comic Chat, and its surprisingly good performance as a screen font on low resolution displays. I'm still not a huge fan of the typeface, mostly from years of exposure to inappropriate uses, but I've certainly become more appreciative of its virtues over the years.

[@lolidkstudio]

didn't expect to see Sabrina, Melissa and Taha here lol :)

[@IanWatson]

100%. Comic Chat screenshots were the source of a lot of early internet memes, and Comic Sans was a big part of Comic Chat, and definitely contributed to its spread.

[@dflyboy420]

Right, on low-res screens and rendered without anti-aliasing it looked pretty okay actually

[@NateVolker]

Quite convenient that he ran into all three of them randomly on the street

[@SpringStarFangirl]

That, plus it's a great font for dyslexic people!

[@mimikyoo]

I think more youtubers should adopt this "Thesis Statement" approach in their videos. Too many youtube videos with long roundabout preambles, to the point that i quite appreciate Linus just opening with his topic.

[@Ed_Stuckey]

The long preambles are to get you past the 32-second mark. That's when YT counts it as a 'watched' video.

[@KenKeenan1973]

The SF writer Bruce Sterling used to have a newsletter called “Viridian Design”, each edition of which used to start with an “Attention Conservation Notice” giving reasons why you _shouldn’t_ read it! If only more content creators could be that confident!

[@princegoatcheese9379]

I believe the reason why most video essay KZbinrs (the ones who have titles like "Unsalted butter is an underrated MASTERPIECE and HERE'S WHY", or whatever) sound like their videos are long-winded without a concrete point is the fact that they don't know much about essay structure. That's not to say they can't understand essay structure, it's very easy to have a central idea of what someone wants to write about and then trail off to five different arguments that don't easily connect with each other. Writing an essay takes practice. Developing a thesis statement is a kind of art form, in my opinion; it's condensing the central idea of the essay into a few easy-to-understand sentences that draws readers (in this case, viewers) to hear what the author has to say. I do agree, Linus does an excellent job of drawing in viewers with a good question and getting right to the point after only a few sentences.

[@boxsterman77]

Yes! People want a presentation coming from a person who has done the work of determining what he/she wants the audience to take away from the episode. They don’t want the journey to that place unfolding.

[@tri-tri-again]

honestly i think one thing shantell sans lacks is the great name that comic sans has. i get that it is inherently connected to the artist that created it and that it is essentially their handwriting at the base of it, but i have to think that a lot of the success of comic sans came from people seeing it on a drop-down menu and thinking “yea i want a comic book vibe.” i think that’s a thing a lot of fonts struggle with honestly. impact is another great name because it does exactly what it does on the tin. it makes an impact with its bold compressed design. i don’t think people are going to be able to pick shantell sans out of the random collections of other “x sans” or “y serif” font names because a lot of people that are doing extremely rudimentary design that would make use of the font are not scrolling the drop down menu one-by-one, they’re looking at the list and saying “oh that one sounds cool and might be what i’m looking for." and most will not take a second look at anything else unless the chosen font is obviously bad. i guess this channel and its viewers (myself included) are already coming into this with an interest in design, but these fonts dont spread because designers know about them and use them, they spread because your grandma picks it out of a dropdown menu when making a birthday card, or the elementary schooler chooses it for their poster about the moon. i just dont think shantell sans has that same attention grab that all the most iconic fonts seem to have.

[@amarion]

they should call it shanty sans

[@asahiko]

In that way Shantell Comic or Comic Shantell would have been a better name

[@ali_new_world]

​@@amarionBrilliant suggestion!

[@lrgogo1517]

I spent the whole vid thinking, "she named the font _directly after herself?_ has any typographer done that?"

[@thehypest]

​@@lrgogo1517that's enough to avoid using it

[@owiebrainhurts]

20:48 yoooo that's me! Interestingly I only use comic sans in lower case and bold - something about it being used normally makes it seem uglier (or perhaps used too seriously) and a result, sometimes people comment on how it took them a while to realise it's actually comic sans. Really cool video! The hate of comic sans comes up in conversation for me every now and again because I use it so much and now I can send em this as a source of info :))

[@Chaotic_Pixie]

I love the design! I feel the sentiment & the choice of fonts perfectly convey the tone of each set of words.

[@PhoenX279]

*sees owiebrainhurts (who I have watched before)* also me: c e l e b r i t y s p o t t e d

[@ArrowType]

This is phenomenal, Linus! So excited to be part of the video.

[@WizardOfDocs]

I've seen a few defenses of Comic Sans in my time. I've never before seen one that starts with "this is what you should be using instead." And I think that framing made it easier for you to explain both the good and the bad of Comic Sans--and what the designers of Shantell Sans learned from it to make their font more deliberately.

[@aModernDandy]

The name "H.B. Ommarghai" at 11:42 made me giggle for a solid minute. Lovely detail

[@krissp8712]

Ah, combining B with the last name there sounds like "B+omberguy". To those who haven't watched hbomb's videos, it's a shout out to a video creator who posted a 3h video essay about plagiarism.

If there's a new skeleton character named Shantell using that font in Deltarune I'm gonna implode

[@Better_call_Floppa]

The little cousin of sans

[@NeoNovastar]

Toby has the chance to do the best thing

[@yeshejksistn]

Oh yes

[@TornaitSuperBird]

The best part is that the person the font is named after would technically have a Deltarune character named directly after her

[@d.b.2215]

What I really love about Shantell Sans is that it has support for my native language Vietnamese just out of the box, no "Việt hoá" (Vietnamisation) effort is needed. This is something that Comic Sans never really managed.

[@Indigoification]

I'm so glad you touched on how comic sans was an (unintentional) first foray into accessible fonts. It's a font that personally irks me... But I'm glad it helped some folks.

[@hugobouma]

There's a misconception I've seen floating around that Comic Sans was _designed_ to be accessible, and that using it is a catch-all way to make something dyslexia-friendly, while also sticking it to the CS-hating snobs. I'm very glad Linus didn't fall into this trap. CS's accessibility was indeed an unintentional side-effect, and as stated in the video, it definitely doesn't work for everyone and the science is inconclusive. The same goes for fonts that _are_ explicitly designed for accessibility, by the way.

[@aburrki6732]

Honestly I feel like Comic Sans looks alright if it isn't written in all caps. And it honestly actually looks nice when aliased and at a small size.

[@sas.tronaut5055]

6:35 “it offends people with eyes” is quite *literally* the exact same thing someone said to Benjamin Franklin about Baskerville. Franklin, being a friend of Baskerville’s wrote to him about it “…he said you would be a Means of blinding all the Readers in the Nation; for the Strokes of your Letters, being too thin and narrow, hurt the Eye, and he could never read a Lone of them without Pain.”

[@vinylarchaeologist]

I’m probably alone in this, but my disdain for ARIAL is way bigger than any dislike for Comic Sans. It pains me to see that this badly bastardised Helvetica has kind of become the “default” font of the World. But it also helps me identify bad products and companies: whenever I see Arial somewhere, I know that company didn’t care enough to hire a designer. So there might be other aspects they didn’t care about, either.

[@re57k]

I'm 100% with you on this one. I've actually grown to love comic sans because it's "silly" the same way that internet cats are silly. Arial however is just weird. It's not as unique as Akzidenz-Grotesk, but it's not corporate and serious enough to be Helvetica. I will admit though, there are certain times where that's exactly what I needed, especially if I needed something 'Y2K" that is still legible, or when I needed to convey carelessness through text, without sacrificing legibility and some level of seriousness. As a body text I don't mind it, but when it tries to pose itself as Helvetica and tries to fill its shoes, it just falls flat and looks cheap. Another time where it's perfectly fine to use Arial, is when you're talking about small businesses and streetside vendors that just needs text written down. Believe me, having them pick a font that is actually legible and somewhat comfortable to read is refreshing (that is if they don't overdo it with effects).

[@jordanwardan7588]

arial looks better than helvetica in all pertinent situations except in the new york metro

[@alesslessless]

Arial the best font

[@pavuk357]

I hate Arial (and Times New Roman for the same reason) because of how awful its Cyrillic version look like. I'm not a designer, I can't just point to what exactly wrong with them, but brain definitely notices. Perhaps the most obvious issue everyone can see is that dots above і and ї are at different height in Arial and Times New Roman.

[@shortnamesalex]

Arial my beloved

[@apollolux]

Looking at Comic Sans in a font editor like FontLab is...interesting. Some of its design decisions can indeed be explained by having been drawn by a ball mouse, others explained by digital typographic constraints of the time like positioning certain nodes for hinting to more easily match the original bitmaps or something. But then there are just some aspects of the design that can't be so easily explained, and that's where the design being intentional versus not comes into play, and I'm of the mind that it wasn't fully intentional.

[@beng6044]

Comic Sans hater here, but appreciate its place. Thanks to introducing me to Shantell Sans. I work in education which is one of the biggest supporters and abusers of comic sans (I've seen powerpoints and worksheets about nazi germany and the holocaust in comic sans). That said, I found I didn't instantly hate Comic Mono. I haven't researched this myself (yet), but wondered if you knew of any research Linus - does font choice make a difference in the understanding and readability of computer programming code? I imagine it's mostly preference, but now I'm wondering if changing the schools default IDE font to Comic Mono or equivalent might make programming less intimidating to learn...

[@tylerphuoc2653]

Saaaaame. Especially with all the different colors tagged for different terms in Mono-typeface coding? That makes the Comic font family look so much more inviting than the usual monochrome presentation of the conventional Comic Sans

[@sodar42]

Anonymous Pro is a great font designed for programming.

[@crediblesalamander8056]

​@@sodar42thanks for the tip. I looked it up and I think I'll use it when I program again.

[@niamhleeson3522]

My school used FixedSys for programming back in the day. Now that I have high-res screens I went with New Heterodox Mono. There are a lot of programming fonts out there. Fantasque Sans Mono is another programming font that claims inspiration from Comic Sans.

[@Adriethyl]

Dunno about IDE fonts (I use Courier New like a pleb), but when I had to write hard essays in school I'd write it in Comic Sans and then when I'm done change it back to the required font. Something about it makes writing easier for me when I usually struggled.

[@EthalaRide]

As someone with dyslexia, Times New Roman a font that helped me read more, at least when I would be in "Autofill" mode to read faster. It was way easier for me to guess *_faster_* what the word would be based on spacing and height of the letters, and how much space was filled up in that "hitbox" essentially, or some letters just looked bolder which helped me distinguish words like "eventually" and "essentially". The "v" is a lot stronger in Times New Roman.

[@icecube-n2d]

Just a question here, what is dyslexia really? The only thing I could see is that letters shuffle themselves?

[@creep2dj216]

@@icecube-n2d For me at least, it's the sharper edges of the letters making them harder to read especially in a contrasting color like black text on a white background or vice versa

[@TheBlumieriest]

I unironically love comic sans for writing drafts for some reason the words just float to the page when I use it! I write all my notes in it it’s just so easy to read

[@maeve615]

Most of my drafts are done in Comic Sans. It's just mellow on on my eyes for reading and re-reading. The letters being a touch akilter stops paragraphs from blurring in to a mash of words with repeated successive reads

[@pipianvideos]

chantell sans reminds me of the paper mario font, called Hey Gorgeous! its pretty equally non formal and its cute :) it would be cool to see a comparison

[@joshualuigi220]

I thought the exact same thing while watching the video and seeing examples of Chantell Sans. I thought that Paper Mario had used it in the more modern games.

[@icecube-n2d]

there is a very big difference between sh and ch, plus they're on entirely different rows, how do you mess that up?

[@almahbuby]

Hey Gorgeous is not the actual font in Paper Mario, iirc it's a fanmade latin-only recreation. The actual one is PopJoy by Fontworks.

[@DisguisedAsHuman]

Way back in 2007ish I did a report on comic sans for my Typography class and learning it’s history gave me a deep appreciation for it.

[@kurekureci]

I have used Comic Mono as my IDE font for coding for like three years now. It makes it more readable for me, and makes the work not as insufferable.

[@GhostlyDilemma]

I might try that Had a classmate once who used Comic Sans in like the worst theme in his IDE. always made fun of him but maybe it's my time to try lmao

[@Respectable_Username]

Heh, reminds me of some of the volunteer tutoring I do (for context it's a quarterly program of women who teach school-aged girls how to code). You always have that one kiddo who messes with their text editor theme at the start of the day, including changing the font colour (which removes syntax highlighting) and changing to a non-monospaced font. And then the poor tutor who has to come around and try to help them, who either has to try parse the code to try figure out where the mistake is without the usual formatting hints they're used to, or try to convince a 13 year old to reset their prettified text editor to one of the default themes 😅

[@JosiahHilden]

I've done this as well, and would strongly recommend giving it a try. (Bonus points, it always gives your coworkers something to talk about when you share your screen)

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

Yeah, Comic Mono works for me. It just makes me more drawn to the code editor.

[@abc-nw3hi]

I was looking for a comment like this - I just tested Shantell Sans in VSCode (works as expected), doesnt seem too bad. But it doesn't work in wezterm afaik, and then i cannot use the font. But good for everyone who wants something like this. I would indeed suggest working on Shantell Sans Mono + Ligatures if there are more people to like it

[@Martyste]

Cool origin story of my own "comic" font: When I grew up in elementary school I quickly disliked the way we were meant to write text on paper, with nearly all glyphs attached to eachothers in various ways depending on how you paired them. It was worse as being a left handed, i would have my wrist slide into my fresh pen ink and smother the clean but tight handwriting into a garbage mess. Then the very first computer classes showed me how a computer displayed text, namely with Times New Roman. I took a liking to it, and began slowly experimenting with an imitation of it on paper, enjoying how it made my lessons look more serious and tidy. The slower and detached writing meant that not only i was less likely to smudge it with my wrist, but smudges would be less effective to a detached writing. I was just 10 but the experiment would come at a pause as it was getting harder to keep up in class with a slower writing than everyone else, and I'd go traditionnal again for a bit. 2 Years later in 2010, my middleschool would bestow all newcomers a Toshiba L500 Satellite Pro laptop fresh from 2009, with Vista and an advertised 60 educational pre-installed apps. 60 to match the number of our department and therefore giving its name "Ordi 60" ( would translate to Com' 60 or smth ). With it I had finally a more up and personal approach to computer fonts, and experimented with more of them. And, very quickly, I took a liking to Calibri, as just like how explained in this video, this font, while remaining tidy and clean, lightens itself of lots of complex features. I take back my pen and paper and practice writing like Colibri. Unsurprisingly, this was much easier and faster to write! And with years of training my hand and wrist to do as little contact to the paper as possible, it meant I could finally enjoy a detached font without bringing myself drawbacks. Years have passed and I never went back to traditionnal school handwriting. And I probably forgot how to do it. In fact, in 2018, when I had Russian class, i couldn't follow because we were taught how to write cyrillic in a non-detached form, which looked quite different to what i would have to type on my notebook ( if I could, on an Azerty! ). So I guess there is still room for improvement, but lately I gave myself the means to. In late 2020 or so, 3 years after attempting to recreate on Birdfont a lost font for a game which only used it in its PS2 version, as a low res texture ( reverse engineering the game's asset names revealed the font was actually called Mettler and was still available, hurrah! ), I opened up this app again for a new idea: I had just carefully wrote down what my handwritting had became after a decade of practice, with a drawing tablet, and I chose to vectorize it into a .ttf, and named it after a friend, Ellion. What results is essentially what would Calibri look like if written by a human, with a few changes to a couple glyphs. As of right now it contains about 150 glyphs covering most of the latin alphabet and common accentuated voyels found in european languages. And my next goal is to add to it my own interpretation of Cyrillic, once i get a feel on how to draw it in the same style as I do latin! Then once I've ironed out a few misalignments it shall be suitable for public sharing, so everyone could type exactly as I would write. I've been using it on a custom HUD for Team Fortress 2 and despite it not having been made for this goal in mind, it works surprisingly okay. It's a dyslexia-friendly font that doesn't prevent itself from being usable in a more serious tone... one little drawback however, is that the font is fairly thin, akin to a sharpened pencil! Shantell font does handle font thickness better than mine, as Bolding my font makes it look a bit weird... but still looks very decent when printed, and no smaller than book font size.

[@pinkertonbyweezer]

I await this with bated breath

[@elcamaronelectronico7477]

Where could we find this font once you do share it?

[@hedgeearthridge6807]

I'm doing some casual research on fonts for critical-duty use in industry. I use Comic Sans as a control, and it keeps beating the other fonts in blur and distortion tests, it's up there with Atkinson Hyperlegible and Intel One Mono. Even when Arial is totally destroyed, Comic Sans can still be read. And the best thing is every Windows computer has it pre-installed, so if you need a font that's all function and zero form for an important use case where character recognition is vital, Comic Sans is a better choice than Arial.

[@ClooverDev]

I can't hear comic sans without thinking about sans undertale

[@mintjaan]

growing up dyslexic and having all of my elementary school assignments in 20-point Comic Sans. there are more dyslexia friendly fonts out there now, but at the time in the late 90s and early 2000s-- it was the one had access to

[@hydreg]

This is an old conversation, but I feel few people mention it: until Windows Vista came along fonts rendered very differently on displays than when they were printed. There was very little antialiasing, so when the text was smaller than 16 pt in normal weight, it would appear as one-pixel-wide outlines. And in that form Comic Sans looked very good. It was readable but rounder and "friendlier" than default fonts. I had it set as main Windows theme font back in Windows Me days and I know many others who did the same on their Win 98SE PCs. I remember being very surprised how different the font looked in print. I'm guessing that's one of the places where the initial affinity for the font came from.

[@SharewareWizard]

I've never really hated the font itself, looking at it on a font sheet, I think it looks nice, I'd also heard it's a really easily readable font for people with problems like dyslexia etc. I've just never found a use for it that looks good. and I don't know if that's just because I can't separate it from the stigma or not.

[@cybernetennis]

On but off topic, Shantell had/has a studio in culver city in Los Angeles where my gym is and shes known as the parking nazi; she chews people out that accidentally park in her designated spots. Shes so rude and arrogant and I had no idea she was a known artist at all. Ill happily use Comic Sans hehe. Love your video otherwise and this channel is just brilliant :)

[@Dan_d00d]

Loved this Linus! That super subtle Flanders boring nachos jab was hilarious.

[@johnaquino7619]

18:30 AH! So - If I understand correctly what she's saying, Shantell treats written text the same as she does art, equal opportunity generalizing, rather than what people are usually trained to do which is specialize enough in writing in order to get good at that in particular. That way, writing is as challenging as art, ( and as enjoyable ) rather than MORE challenging which would create a barrier to entry. Clever. 🙂

[@teamok1025]

Cool

[@TheMox15]

Anwser in progress and Linus! Love to see some of my favorite channels together

[@alpacamale2909]

comics sans is the graphic equivalent of the ukelele music in diy tutorials

[@Trassel242]

Thank you for telling me about Shantell Sans, honestly I think it’ll greatly help my writing as I’ve found that changing the font to Comic Sans gets rid of my performance anxiety about writing, but it’s just not a very good font for me, so Shantell Sans will be perfect for this reason alone. Plus I’m running a tabletop roleplaying game where my players have dyslexia and other things, so it’s always good to know there’s a nice Comic Sans alternative that might help them out when I’m playing with them.

[@alt8791]

Bouncing between the three Answers in Progress people for the three reasons people hate comic sans was hysterical

[@nationsquid]

Loved this!!!!! Thanks for inviting me along and keep up the great work. :)

[@Spectrythium]

Welcome to the underground

[@Respectable_Username]

I love how, despite KZbin being so big and wild and so many people following so many different creators, pretty much everyone in this happy little bubble could enjoy and be in on the jokes referencing other creators. I like this little KZbin bubble. It's a nice little KZbin bubble ❤

[@BarelyNoticeable]

6:23 LOL seeing Taha act so enthusiastic about hating comic sans was sO amusing 😂🤣

[@garnthegalaxy]

New favorite font for me. Thanks Linus. Thanks Shantell.

[@vinuzula]

Yoo! It’s Answer in Progress!!

[@BarelyNoticeable]

Shoutout to old school Gunnarolla’s “The Comic Sans Song”

[@MedlifeCrisis]

Loved all the cameos!

[@briansieve]

You're awesome just for taking this on

[@DoranGale]

Change fonts before hitting submit/send! We tend to skim over our own writing, and we’re even more likely to miss errors in a familiar font. Change the font of your entire work and proofread, then change the font back to something suitable for submission.

[@latenightlogic]

8:20 and yet it’s revealed his favourite wine of all time is actually a form of Merlot - a fact I absolutely love.

[@ChadWSmith]

I'm glad you mentioned (at least for a moment) Comic Neue. I love Comic Neue, and I even supported it on Kickstarter back in the day.

[@stevieinselby]

💥 Taha nails it: It offends people with eyes 👀

[@kurageh1me]

I actually love it way, way more! Thank you for this video!

[@unoriginalusername4416]

Shantell Sans looks so much like older Nintendo game fonts to me, like the one used for Paper Mario. Very cool stuff, will definitely be using it in the future!

[@ninevolt]

yesss agreed

[@VSPhotfries]

Love this vid. I've never understood the crazy reaction some folks have to comic sans, and always either assumed they were joking or needed some sort of therapy - and I say this as a high-strung person with a ton of gripes about nothing. True, if I commissioned a sign or something and it was used, sure, but man, the second it's used anywhere, no matter how innocuous, SOMEONE has to screech about it, and 9/10 times it's just a feeble attempt to look smart or sophisticated.

[@alpacamale2909]

My favorite font is Negotiate Regular. Subtitles look flawless with it.

[@MQWalkman]

As a pathological font collector, I have now instantly got Shantell Sans and am playing with it now. I will subscribe to your newsletter in case you have any other suggestions!

[@Willensimperium]

I didn't realise how much I missed a Linus Boman video until I saw this after FOUR MONTHS.

[@hurri-db]

I love comic sans so much. I use it passive aggressively at work. And I read everything written in comic sans in a slightly sarcastic voice.

[@benloud8740]

The editing and production of your videos has gotten so good

[@davebauerart]

Absolutely! I was working on a project with Comic Sans when Shantell Sans was released and immediately switched!

[@b3at1]

it's always a good day when Linus uploads

[@ReddestRosa]

11:41 read this whole thing, based af

[@AdamChristensen]

Your videos check so many of my 90s PC nostalgia boxes. Entertaining and educational. Love it all! ❤❤❤

[@stellamcwick8455]

Nice, you roped the Answer In Progress team into this. I like it when Sabrina and Co. can weigh in on weird topics.

[@low-energypolitics5677]

This will be my next obsession. Currently fine-tuning the sliders to find the exact variation of Shantell Sans that really speaks to me.

[@danielcreepercristo9864]

Comic Sans just got a Serious upgrade... Now its *Serious Sans!* *Fires comically sized minigun at a horde of Kleer skeletons as Megalovania plays in the background**

[@kohakkanuva3224]

comic sans to me has always felt very "unvanny valley" to me. Not quite digital, but also not quite handwritten. Shantell sans goes all in on the handwritten style and I love it. It makes it feel more natural.

[@mikemosz]

I think you're missing a core element of the sociological hypothesis, although the Sideways thing gets close. Even among 'normies' there was a big devaluing of suburban American cultural touchstones of the previous generation - chain restaurants like Olive Garden, light beers, etc., etc. all suddenly became quite unpopular and associated with uncool, older people and to some extent the right. Comic Sans was strongly associated with that culture and its church newsletters, fliers, what have you. It's a big part of why Comic Sans became prominent and polarising - and not many people go to Applebee's anymore.

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

I think it's really beautiful how Shantell found herself as an artist and created this work from the depths of her soul. I can't wait to use it if I ever have to type something for five-year-olds.

[@scraptrapmemeboy]

just got jumpscared by the answer in progress crew

[@vera9230]

Personally I feel like the biggest appeal to me as a child in microsoft office choosing Comic Sans, and what I've heard from others, is that it was a default option that looked the closest to handwriting. Even still I feel like outside of cursive script fonts, you won't find a lot of natural handwritten fonts available to the average person in most places they'd ever select a font.

[@modest_meghan]

your videos are so well organized and explained, thanks! love Shantell Sans, also LOVE Comic Code. need to start using that at work.

[@chrisv4472]

Another excellent video, but I think I'm going to stick to Atkinson Hyperlegible. It's become my go-to font since seeing your video on it.

[@bmac4]

The great thing about fonts is theyre very democratic now, and multiple fonts can do multiple things! You just click a button to install and can use em as you see fit.

[@Cow-Moth-With-A-CRT-Head]

Ooh, I love Shantell Sans! The look of the letters reminds me very fondly of the font used in the Paper Mario games, which I found exceedingly readable when I wqs younger. I dont know what I'd use it for, but I am grabbing this font as soon as I can!

[@Shiradrenaline]

Really great video, as usual! Looking forward to the newsletter and to using Shantell Sans appropriately.

[@aedyaedyaedy]

AIP GUEST APPEARANCE OUT OF NOWHERE??!! :D

[@zachrodan7543]

12:22 this screen with text orbiting a number like that... ironically not easy to read (likely in any font, but especially this one). I think it might just be hard to process both rotating AND moving text simultaneously?

[@Noreen_Ni_Riain]

20:27 I picked Andale Mono correctly! Thanks for the free dopamine, Linus 😅

[@caiocc12]

3:47 that blue billboard was in my home city! That address was next to my school

[@timowagner1329]

I dont know how often I´ve heard the origin story of comic sans, but this video has it all: Especially the alternative. Legibility needs to be a top priority for standard fonts! And this video perfectly illustrates it. And those transitions 😩👌 You´re a good man Linus. Merry Christmas!

[@plasmacotton]

shantell sans looks actually good, can't wait to use it

[@Chaotic_Pixie]

I went to high school back in the day when your two choices for papers was Times New Roman or Arial… both of which suck TBH. My absolute favorite semester was when we had a student teacher & he handed out a list of acceptable fonts & those two weren’t on it & at the top, he specifically requested Comic Sans. He said that viewing the words on the screen as you type them & viewing the words on the page as you read them while grading should be pleasurable experiences that compliment the pleasure of learning new things through the content of the words. He was also dyslexic & teaching a history course. I tell you though, so many of us were thanking him and thinking he was so cool for being so chill about fonts. It was 2003… we all loved Comic Sans & given the choice of any font, it was always what was chosen. I swear, it’s why people loved doing PowerPoints. They got to use Comic Sans, word art, and the animations were a fun touch too.

[@jimmadson]

Linus, I immediately noticed the typeface you used for a good portion of your video. It is clearly Adobe Garamond at about a 80% horizontal scale. That was the go-to style for the late 80s. Have you done a video about that?

[@Phlarx]

There's one thing about the menu at 3:50 that bothers me far more than the font: the alignment. The prices are just waving all over the place. Looks to me like someone designed it in some other font, and used the spacebar to align the prices, then someone else came along and changed the font without even considering the alignment.

[@Absbor]

Due to my autism and hardship of english reading, I searched through fonts that were similar or easy to read. Trebuchet MS was similar to my handwriting (the a is different tho) and comic sans for its easiness. now all of the words and youtube captions are in either of the 2 fonts. altho I like the goofy appeal of Shantell Sans, I prefer not to download yet another font. comic sans is already estabilished everywhere I go and is immediatelly noticable (my older sibling was angry why my browser font is in comic sans, lmao) and therefore easier for me digest. Good video and thanks for explaining. 👍

[@r.henryjr.1533]

I appreciate how you get to the point immediately

[@Respectable_Username]

I'm curious: With the greater awareness of Comic Sans being a helpful font for at least some folks with dyslexia, has there been any push to officially standardise Comic Sans or any of its dyslexia-friendly counterparts for all school material aimed at kids in their first few years of schooling? As in, all handouts and worksheets aimed at the young students themselves? Could help to prevent kids from falling behind in those early years, especially with those more distinctive letterings, and have a curb-cut effect even for those kids without dyslexia who still might not have as much support at home for the memorisation of the different letters (no shade to the parents, especially in these capitalistic times where all parental figures have to work full time in order to get by). Hmm, if anyone knows of existing research/campaigns on the issue, my aunt keeps failing to retire from the Board of Studies, which sets the school curriculum here in NSW. If there's existing resources out there specifically on using dyslexia-friendly fonts in the early primary years for teaching reading, I could send those through to her so at least somebody with the power to do something is aware. I know she still hasn't fully retired yet because she was complaining over Christmas lunch the other week about impractical design-by-committee additions to how Auslan should be taught (side note: also the first time I'd heard that any sign language would be part of the standard school curriculum, which I think is awesome!)

[@domesticcat1725]

The evidence for comic sans actually being more dyslexic-friendly and to what degree it would be is still inconclusive, so the wording of "comic sans being a helpful font" is a little misleading

[@Helperbot-2000]

nah, the psychological damage people get from reading it, and the physical damage to the computer and desk caused after they do far outweighs it unfortunately

[@hugobouma]

There's a lot more to accessible design than simply switching the font, even to one like OpenDyslexic that's explicitly designed for this purpose. Things like point size, line/word/letter spacing, line _length,_ contrast, any other distractions on the page are just as influential but a lot harder to codify into regulations. And while there's anecdotal evidence that Comic Sans works for certain people with dyslexia (like Shantell Martin, evidently), for others it definitely doesn't, and any scientific research so far has been inconclusive.

[@mcknackus4721]

This was amazing and informative. Definitely gonna put Shantell Sans in my toolbelt, even though I'm less likely to use it on a meme of a highly detailed skeleton eating corndogs.

[@Tysto]

11:04 The polo shirt and car keys of fonts?

[@hugobouma]

Khakis.

Hey ! I wasn't expecting to see Answer in Progress ! Great !

[@fjolliff6308]

Comic sans was a life saver when it came to educational software. All the others would just blur together after a while of reading... I wished I could choose the font for my studies. If I was online I could copy+paste into a word document and change the font. It was like a cool drink of clean water after a long walk in summer- but, for my eyes. Comic sans gave me fewer headaches and less eye fatigue, so I didn't understand why it was so hated.

[@mattshnoop]

8:14 I can't help but notice that the citation blurb is in Recursive, another one of ArrowType's fonts. Good choice ;)

[@Nebs1]

I work for a railway company and someone wrote out the entire ‘what authority is needed to pass each signal while displaying a red light’ document in comic sans capital letters and I just can’t look at it without being amused.

[@ccn690]

I recently found your channel and had binged all of your videos, was stoked to see a new one 🎉

[@coal.sparks]

I giggled a bit when the Answers in Progress folks wandered through. :)

[@relito_anima]

Toby Fox gonna love this

[@TonyOstrich]

Funny you mention the monospace version for coding. After coming across your video about Atkinson Hyperlegible I really wanted to find a monospace version of it for coding. It's unfortunate there isn't an official version, but I have found one or two enthusiast versions that work pretty well.

[@mylena3086]

Thanks for including dyslexic folks and the whole accessibility thing I was just thinking about it and if I should suggest getting into it But then you already thought of it and it's even linked to the creator of Shantelle Love when that happens Appreciate it a lot Have a good one

[@domobject]

I think if Comic Sans like the Lars Ulrich of fonts. Uneven, easy to be a snob about, but very functional, and has most likely gotten more people into drumming/typesetting than anything else.

[@apm77]

Will try to remember to share this video with my graphic design team mates when I get back from holidays. Accessibility is important to us so I think the dyslexia connection will be of particular interest.

[@ChromaAqui]

3:47 Crazy Brazil mentioned moment (Cabo Frio is a municipality in Rio de Janeiro)