Ugly Fonts #1

Welcome to a new series on my blog called Ugly Fonts. I once read that there are no bad fonts, only bad designers. I don’t really agree with that statement but I decided to put it to the test anyway. For each post in this series, I will choose an ugly font that every designer hates and (try my best to) design something good with it. If you would like to join me in this challenge, I have established some ground rules.

The Rules

1. The design must be a typography based design (i.e. include mostly text)
2. Only the ugly font that was chosen can be used and nothing else (no font pairing here)
3. The design must not make fun of or criticise the font you are using in any way – the point is to be totally serious with it

As you’ve probably noticed already, I have chosen Comic Sans for this post because it is considered to be the most hated font in the world. It also happens to be one of the most popular fonts in the world. (Vincent Connare, the creator of Comic Sans, compares it to Justin Bieber and Ugg boots.) Because so many people abuse it, there are websites petitioning to ban Comic Sans completely (I don’t agree with them because it turns out that Comic Sans helps people with dyslexia to read and IMO, that is enough reason to keep it around).

My Design

I decided to make a poster. At first I played around with the idea of making a zine because I figured that the informality of a zine would be quite forgiving to an ugly font like Comic Sans, but I settled on the poster idea because I wanted to use a bright yellow background but didn’t have any yellow paper.

For my poster design, I was inspired by the work of Art Chantry, who is famous for his low-budget, grungy designs. His process involves cutting and pasting found images and type and then photocopying and re-photocopying them to achieve the desired effect. I love the non-conformity that this style represents and felt it would work for this.

I found an image of Vincent Connare and added a halftone effect in Photoshop because 1) it disguised the low quality of the image and 2) it added a graphic, almost comic book feel to the design, which I think is appropriate.

I printed out some Comic Sans facts using white text on a black background for contrast. I typed out the credits/sources section on a black background and tore it out for a more interesting effect. I then stuck everything on a white piece of paper using Prestik, so I could move things around if I needed to.

Finally, I scanned the whole thing and added a bright yellow background in Photoshop and this is how it turned out:

I’m not sure if this is a good design or not – I guess that is up for debate. Leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

If you feel like taking up this challenge yourself, please share your design – I would love to see what you come up with. Post a link to your design in the comments below, tag me on Instagram (@petrovivier) or email your design to me at hello@petrovivier.co.za.

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