Font of All Knowledge
I’m a Comic Sans MS guy. I presume many of you reading this are Comic Sans MS peeps too. That’s because I work in education and Comic Sans MS seems to be the go-to, friendly looking, easily readable typeface. At least that’s what I tell myself.
When I first started teaching, the school I worked at had Sassoon Primary Infant, which was delicious, but I later found out that that school paid extra for the font pack which included Sassoon Primary Infant. After 2 years, the contract for the font pack wasn’t renewed and since then I’ve had to rely on good old Comic Sans MS.
But why am I talking about fonts? Why should you read it? Isn’t this the most boring blog topic ever conceived? Maybe. Almost certainly, in fact. However, blogging is a new thing for me, and the business, and after the first few blogs in 2024 I found that I was forcing blog topics upon myself for the sake of making them relevant, interesting and connected to the work we do at Reasoning Club.
My business blog resolution this year is just to write about what I notice – hopefully, this will increase the quantity of blogs I write (and reduce the word count slightly to make them more accessible and less at risk of being very boring!).
I am writing about fonts because two things happened last week which made me reflect on them. The first – and utterly unconnected to primary maths teaching – was when I watched an old episode of ‘That Mitchell and Webb Look’, one of the skits involved Rob reading the filming schedule and finding it really funny but not knowing why. David realised that it is because the schedule is written in Comic Sans MS and then goes on a 2-minute rant about how awful Comic Sans MS is, mainly commenting that people who use it have nothing interesting or funny to say so they use Comic Sans to make themselves look cool!
The second was at a Reasoning Club session in Ormskirk on Friday. The children were doing a new task, ‘Up the Steps We Go. Or Maybe Down’. I went over to talk to a pupil about how they solved the first problem and how they were going to use what they had leant to solve the rest of the questions. When I got next to her table, she was anxious about the remaining questions, which had been exacerbated by a font error! She finished her small monologue by saying, “It isn’t even all in the same font! Look, this one’s different to the rest of the page! And this one’s different as well!” (It turned out that this second font error was because one of the numbers was in bold, not a different font!).
The offending errors, clearly showing the number 2 written in Tahoma and 8 in bold!
It was an interesting experience. In 18 years, I don’t think I have ever had a conversation about fonts with a pupil before. Even if I had known that the fonts were different (which I didn’t – it would not have been printed if I did!), I would never have expected anyone to actually notice!
But someone did notice.
What fonts do you use? Are you in education? Are you a person who uses Comic Sans outside of education? What is your favourite font?
Let me know in the comments below or on social media.
Thanks for reading. For posterity, my other favourite fonts (mainly for display purposes) are chiller and Jokerman.
Addendum: I write my blogs in word and then copy and paste them into the website, unfortunately Squarespace doesn’t allow me to keep my font choices so some of the impact has been lost!
