"The Higgs Boson, Announced In Comic Sans, Reveals A Failing Of Modern Type"
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670323/the-higgs-boson-announced-in-comic-sans-reveals-a-failing-of-modern-type?goback=%2Egde_55743_member_137231756
Wh scientists aren't graphic designers
5 Comments
I've been at CERN a year ago. They badly need a graphic designer. :)
And? should be afraid of black holes??? :OOO
LOL. My friend shared this with me the other day and I told her "Sorry but using Comic Sans makes their scientific breakthroughs INVALID".
Comic Sans strikes again.
Back in July, Errol Morris, from the online commentary of the New York Times, wrote an essay and a small quiz about being an optimist or a pessimist...
It turns out the quiz wasn't really about the optimism or the pessimism of readers. It was about typefaces! In particular, it was a test of the effect of a typeface on credulity. Each participant was presented with a passage in one of six randomly assigned typefaces: Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans and Trebuchet. Then, they were asked if they thought the claim was true.
The results are in. Morris' conclusion: "Comic Sans has the lowest rate of agreement, and one of the highest rates of disagreement."
For those who want to read the entire article, it is available in two (fairly long) parts:
Part One: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/hear-all-ye-people-hearken-o-earth/
Part Two: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/hear-all-ye-people-hearken-o-earth-part-2/
To be honest though, the discrepancies are very very small and might not be statistically significant, plus the individual sampling is completely biased (they were all New York Times readers). Nevertheless, I find this interesting and I thought some of you might too.
Spintherism.
In other news, the MAHLI calibration target in the Curiosity rover is set in Arial with at least one instance of questionable kerning.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0034MH0044002000E1_DXXX&s=34
Spintherism.