‘Comic Sans Project’ Seeks to Save the Web’s Most Hated Font

1. Tumblr

The Tumblr logo itself is re-imagined with the Comic Sans treatment.

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Some fonts get no respect. This is true of Comic Sans, the ’90s-era Microsoft typeface that sought to emulate comic book text and failed miserably, by most accounts.

The font’s childish, unsophisticated scrawl and overuse by armchair designers has rendered it taboo in most artistic circles, and the sophisticated web at large enforces a moratorium on its use. Some have even campaigned to rid the web of it forever.

But despite the haters, French designers Thomas Blanc and Florian Amoneau have sought to spark a movement. Their new Tumblr, entitled the Comic Sans Project, tries to re-imagine the much-maligned font by posing a simple aesthetic question: What if the world’s most recognizable logos used Comic Sans?

“We have been inspired by all the jokes about Comic Sans we heard and read on the Internet every day,” says Blanc. “We wanted to create our own personal joke with those ironic logos. At the same time, we actually tried to defend Comic Sans [by] posting only logos which look good enough to us. Some of them work pretty well!”

SEE ALSO: A History of Western Typefaces [INFOGRAPHIC]

You can see the results above. With their six-day-old, half-ironic Tumblr, Blanc and Amoneau seem to have awoken a latent and widespread appreciation of the font — as if the world had been waiting for someone to say: It’s OK to love Comic Sans again.

“We received a lot of cheering emails and a lot of submissions from all over the world,” says Blanc, who intends to open the site to user-generated content soon.

What’s next for the Comic Sans Project? There are 20 more logos in the works, including NASA and M&M’s, says Blanc. “We also plan to use the benefits of this little fame to find a job in Paris. We will redesign logos of French advertising agencies and send it to them.”

Take note, kids. This is content marketing at its finest.

Images used with permission.

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