Font Advice
October 1st, 2008
What font should I use in my comics? I realize people are passionate about fonts, but I doubt most people have the expertise to explain why one font is better than another.
I admit it, I do not “get” fonts. Most look the same to me, and I do not know what makes one font “good” and another “bad”.
Thus, I seek your advice. Leave a comment and tell me what font to use in the comics. Preferably back it up with some explanation. Without that explanation, I won’t know why your favorite font is any better than someone else’s favorite font.
You should take a class on typography and then answer this question yourself. If you decide to take my advice, let me know. I am interested in typography also and would probably like to take the class as well.
I think the font you’ve been using. I don’t see any reason to change it. Then again, I’m a fan of Comic Sans.
Lately I’ve used “Chalkboard” because that’s a comic-looking font that came with my Mac.
Well, for comics, comic sans actually makes sense. Most of the comic sans hate comes from non-designers using it as a normal font, and it’s actually very unreadable. This means: Big long sentences broken into paragraphs are hard to read, because the letters tend to blur everything into a grey blob.
http://typetester.org is an easy way to compare fonts. If you look at the displays of comic sans versus lucida grande at 10 pt, and then squint or walk away from the monitor, comic sans will “blur” together faster than, say lucida grande (which is an awesome normal font, IMO).
But for comics, comic sans actually makes sense. You’ll notice, however, that “normal” comics use all-caps, and really tight line spacing. (One line goes right on top of the other.) The lower case font is usually not used very often.
I mean, even check out the Google Chrome demo: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ In the bubbles, no lower case, just capitals.
Dude, I totally took a trip again to the department of redundancy department again.
Oh, and here’s a great, short overview of typography.
http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five_simple_steps_to_better_typography/
After reading that, font selection, page setup, etc, all started to make sense.
Last comment. I promise.
They’re your comics so use a font that appeals to you. But since they’re comics use a handwriting font; there are plenty of free ones. For example,
http://www.fontpool.com/categories/funny/page1.html
Oops, fonts from Font Pool aren’t free, but they’re really inexpensive.
Use a font from http://swank.ca/caffeen/fonts/ like ‘Jim Teacher’ cause the artist of those fonts is like totally your biggest fan….
Take a look at http://www.blambot.com/fonts.shtml for some really nice fonts, and some are even free
Though personally, I prefer the font you’ve been using. It just has that Stuff That Happens Feel ™
Hah, I’m with you on fonts… but whatever you do, don’t use Arial or suffer a rebuff from someone like Gruber: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/10/01/mobile-flickr
I would say that the so-called passion regarding particular fonts is mostly a gross case of herd mentality, hero worship, and people who are doing more complaining than creating (e.g. Gruber). Different fonts have different feels. There may be a common type of font for achieving a particular effect, but there is no correct font.
Seriously, loving the comics
Victoria: Writing is creating! You can disagree with him, but show some respect.
Eric: I haven’t been able to find a font I like, so I’ve been Wacomming in all my text. You might consider getting a really cheap one—not good enough for drawing, but good enough for words. Alternately, you could make your own font, so you only need to connect the real and digital worlds once.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/tabletpc.mspx
Hand-lettered text or text in a custom font does plenty of awesome to comics.
Debatably on the subject of typography, you might also want to try (potentially time-consuming) alternatives to roundrects for speech bubbles:
http://www.goodshipchronicles.com/tutballoon.php
@Superdotman thanks for the link to the speech bubble article! I’ll definitely give that a shot.
EB my not-yet-met-in-person cyber-bud.
I like “Poor Richard” because it’s designed to look somewhat like what Ben Franklin used in the first editions of “Poor Richard’s Almanac”. BF is my hero, so I like using “Poor Richard” when possible.