The business font of all evil has won

Shares in the much loved and often loathed Wetherspoon pub chain jumped last month after the British group said its sales had overtaken pre-pandemic levels.

This is nice news if you are among the hordes who throng to the company’s 800 or so pubs for cut-price beer and grub, and even nicer for its outspoken, Brexit-backing founder, Tim Martin.

I thought of Martin when I read about this development, which he put down to things such as sales of chicken putting in “a clucking good performance”. Specifically, I thought about one baffling aspect of his business that has cropped up repeatedly in the many articles written about him: Comic Sans.

The famously contentious typeface, I keep reading, is what Martin’s long-standing personal assistant uses to type out all his memos. But why? If you’re already one of the most polarising bosses in your industry, why would you double down with a move that smacks of division?

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Not to mention a lack of seriousness? I emailed Martin’s press team to find out and soon received an emailed reply from the man himself, via his assistant, in what looked like businesslike Arial. “Comic Sans had never hit my consciousness before your query and I have never knowingly specified a type of font,” Martin said.

He didn’t use email himself, he added, and often sent texts or dictated phone messages to Tina Coppitters, his assistant, who turned them into emails before sending them to the intended recipient. Tina then sent me an email, in unapologetic Comic Sans, to say: “Just to clarify, Tim has never asked me to use any particular type of font – it’s just the font I use.”

So there it was. Mystery solved. Any Spoons critics who had been sniffily thinking it was just typical of Tim Martin to require Comic Sans need to think again. All of which raises another question: what is it about people like me who find a hapless font, beloved by schools around the world, so goofy and unacceptable in business communication?

In my defence, I am not alone. I know a man who once had to gently persuade his boss to stop using Comic Sans in staff emails for fear the leader’s thoughts would not be taken seriously. Also, an entire Ban Comic Sans movement sprang up, initially as a joke among graphic designers, to destroy what its founders called “this evil of typographical ignorance”.

The campaign took off after Microsoft unleashed the comic book-inspired design in the 1990s via its Windows software. The font became a global hit, even though it was never even supposed to be a typeface, writes Simon Garfield in Just My Type: A Book About Fonts. Its creator, former Microsoft designer Vincent Connare, devised it to make some of the firm’s software look more friendly and it ended up in Windows. There’s no real mystery about why Comic Sans became so popular.

It’s easy to read and cheerful, which is why it’s so popular in schools. But those same admirable traits are what makes it jar when it strays into more formal settings, like a war memorial or a medical form or a courtroom. At the public inquiry into the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of UK sub-postmasters last year, there were titters when the inquiry’s lead counsel said an email shown to the proceedings, written in Comic Sans, was “headache-inducing”.

A few months later, when an Islamabad judge overturned a conviction of Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan, some news outlets reported the order had been printed in Comic Sans. I cannot confirm if this really was the case, but I was not surprised to see the harsh online response the reports drew. “Court documents in comic sans . . . Pakistan..pls,” said one person. “[This] country is so not serious,” said another.

That may be, but there is no sign that decades of Comic Sans derision have had any effect. The typeface continues to flourish, prompting ongoing faceplants from those who love to hate seeing it on street signs, advertisements, hotel foyers, supermarket signs and, let’s face it, pretty much anywhere.

I maintain it’s important to know how profoundly the design affects a certain type of person in a certain type of context. But I concede that both the typeface and its inventor have had the last laugh. If you type “Vincent Connare” into Google, everything comes up in glorious Comic Sans. Beat that, Helvetica. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024