The Sincerity Machine Is a Comic Sans Typewriter — Seriously
Even people who pay no attention to what font they have selected tend to have some familiarity with Comic Sans — a vaguely childish typeface that came to us by way of mid-1990s Microsoft Windows and other products. It has become famous, in recent years, as an object of scorn for designers: A lot of people really hate it. (See BanComicSans.com, for instance.)
But not, evidently, Jesse England, an artist and educator based in Pittsburgh. His Sincerity Machine is a manual typewriter custom-modified to type in Comic Sans. He concedes that the typeface is “ridiculed” but, he goes on in this explainer video below, “it is also a mark of sincerity for those who do not have graphic design experience.”
It’s not that he loves Comic Sans, he clarifies. “I just don’t think it deserves the flak it gets.”
If you’ve got questions or comments for England, he offers up a snail-mail address where you can write (or type) to him, here.
Poking around England’s site, it becomes clear how this fits into a variety of projects he’s undertaken that address technology, media, and communication. I particularly admire this effort to modify a camera to take pictures that look as if they came from Google Street View, and his lessons on how to handwrite in different fonts.
Comic Sans sympathizers may be interested in hearing a few remarks from its creator, Vincent Connare, delivered at ROFLCon in 2009. (He explains how the letterforms were based on comic-book lettering, and concedes that “it’s often badly used” in settings where its lighthearted tone doesn’t make sense. On the other hand, he seems philosophical about the fact that, of all the work he’s done, “Nothing has ever made as much of an impact as the typeface.”
And one more interesting footnote: A few years ago, as part of an online experiment, filmmaker Errol Morris ran a quiz through the The New York Times site that was supposedly about optimism and pessimism. But among the things it really set out to gauge was the relationship between typography and believability. Comic Sans fared poorly.
Does this contradict England’s message? Not really. We may figure that a message in Comic Sans is sincere — but that doesn’t necessarily mean we believe it.
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