Comic Sans alternatives and playful handwritten type

Where it came from

Comic Sans was drawn by Vincent Connare at Microsoft in 1994. He was working on Microsoft Bob, a software package with a cartoon dog that spoke to the user in speech bubbles set in Times New Roman. A formal book serif coming out of a cartoon dog looked wrong, and Connare, who had comic books on his desk, drew a casual face in response — he has cited the lettering in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns as reference.

It missed the Bob deadline, shipped elsewhere in Windows, and became one of the most widely distributed typefaces ever made. Almost all of the derision it attracts is really about it being used where a casual voice was not wanted, which is a choice made by users rather than a flaw in the drawing.

What makes it read as friendly

Four things do most of the work, and they are the things to reproduce in your own drawing rather than the specific letterforms.

• Irregular stroke endings. Terminals stop where a pen would stop rather than being squared off to a rule. Nothing lines up perfectly.
• Uneven widths. The letters are not built from a shared skeleton, so each one has its own rhythm. This is what stops it reading as systematic.
• A large x-height with generous, open counters. The enclosed spaces inside a, e and o are round and roomy, which reads as approachable and stays legible when small.
• Almost no contrast between thick and thin. The stroke is one weight throughout, like a felt-tip pen, which is informal by association.

Drawing your own casual hand

The temptation is to draw carefully. Resist it — precision is the one thing that will make a casual face fail.

Use a felt-tip or a fineliner with a consistent width and no flex. Write at a comfortable speed rather than slowly; the slight wobble of a normal writing pace is exactly the quality you are after, and it cannot be faked by drawing wobbles deliberately.

1. 01Write the whole alphabet in one sitting so the rhythm stays consistent.
2. 02Keep the x-height tall relative to the capitals — around 70 per cent is a good starting point.
3. 03Keep the counters open. Where a stroke curves back toward itself, leave more room than feels necessary.
4. 04Do not correct your letters afterwards. Redrawing an O to be rounder is how you lose the character.
5. 05Write the punctuation too. A casual face with formal punctuation is a giveaway.

Converting it

Photograph or scan the sheet in flat, even light with the letters clearly separated. When you convert, smoothing is measured from the image rather than fixed, so an informal hand gets curve-friendly tracing without you having to reason about it. If the terminals come back rounder than you drew them, lower smoothing by hand — those blunt stopped ends are carrying much of the character.

Spacing is worth spending a minute on. A casual face set too tight reads as cramped rather than friendly; set it slightly looser than you would a text face and read a full sentence before deciding.

When a casual face is the right answer

For a child's party invitation, a classroom worksheet, a comic, a hand-lettered sign or an informal note, a casual face is genuinely correct and a neutral sans would be worse. The criticism aimed at Comic Sans is a criticism of using it on a hospital notice, not of the category.

A face drawn in your own hand has one advantage no library face can match: nobody has seen it before, so it carries no accumulated associations at all.