So, last week I have been told that I did not have a clear targert of what I was criticising. It was true, I lumped everything in 2 pages of newspaper without making clear what I was agreeing with or disagreeing with.

I contemplated my ideas and then I thought of the typeface Comic Sans. Comic Sans has raised a lot of heated debates around it. bancomicsans.com was campaign to eradicate the misuse of the font Comic Sans.

The hysteria around comic sans emerged more than 10 years ago. With the aid of social media echoing effect, the use of Comic Sans had become sitgmatised. The hatred towards the typeface were so much that people stigmatised any appearance of it. There was an online flash game called kill comic sans, which was basically a first person shooter against the typeface.

Indeed in some contexts, Comic Sans looks very in appropriate like law firm logos or gravestones. Yet, it does not mean that in all occassions, Comic Sans equals to inappropriate and dumb. For a period of time, it was hated extremely.

Reading so much Lyotard over the summer, it made me think about how he coined the term Paralogy. Where he propsoed that there shoudl not be consensus in discourse, yet it is just a process, not the goal. For example, when people discuss how a design should be clear on its message, we might have differen idea on the clarity. Whether it means to be easy to extract informations, leave a good impression on the audience or simply just mean subjectively assiociate with cleaniness and tidiness.

There are some stigmatisation of particular methods, means or whatever elements that the “design world” hates. There is somewhat a similarity with this instagram account.

whether it was just parodies or not, scrolling through comment sections, some people took it seriously as some sort of design discourse. this is one of the comment retrieved from the facebook page of the same instagram account about designers humour.

There feels like a lot of parallel scienarios happening between Comic Sans Hysteria and whatever it the meme account is talking about. One of the most noticeable one was the usage of a template oriented design app called Canva.