The Star Wars logo, reimagined with the Comic Sans font

If you’ve ever used a computer, you know what Comic Sans is. It’s quite possibly the world’s most hated font. Internet trolls have piled on the hate for ages. But maybe it’s time to give Comic Sans a second chance.

Comic Sans originated with Microsoft, somewhere around Windows 95, and has been included in pretty much every Microsoft product since. It’s meant to emulate the simplistic, handwritten look of the average comic book, but anyone who used it for a real comic book — professional or amateur — would be in for a sound throttling.

The Walt Disney Pictures logo, reimagined with Comic Sans

A pair of Frenchmen think it’s time to change all that. Thomas Blanc and Florian Amoneau have created a Tumblr blog called The Comic Sans Project, where the duo is trying to give the maligned font some much-needed street cred. They’re doing this by reimagining popular brands and logos with Comic Sans in place of their current font. The results are surprisingly respectable. Some of the logos they’ve created look good enough to be the real thing.

The Tumblr blog is only a few days old, but it appears that it’s already encouraging closet Comic Sans users to step out into the light. They’re planning to start accepting outside submissions soon, so if you have a great idea for putting Comic Sans to use in a popular logo, now’s the time to start working on it. In the meantime, visit Blanc and Amoneau’s Tumblr blog to see more of their Comic Sans logos.

The PlayStation logo, reimagined using Comic Sans

Dyslexie

Dyslexia is a condition that everyone knows about, but perhaps may not truly understand. Not having any personal with it, I probably do not know just how difficult having the condition, but I can just imagine! Dyslexia has been studied intensively, and programs have been tried and tested to help dyslexics deal with their situation.

A Dutch graphic artist is saying, though, that you do not need to have a Doctorate in Philosophy to come up with a practical solution to dyslexia. Christian Boer has designed a new font that is supposed to help dyslexics recognize letters properly.

Called Dyslexie, the font applies slight changes to certain letters in the alphabet. For example, the differences in the letter “b” and the letter “d” make it easier to distinguish between them. The “b” slightly leans forward, while the “d” leans backward. Some people also have problems distinguishing between the letter “j” and the letter “i”, so what Boer did was to make the former slightly askew.

So just how effective is Dyslexie in helping dyslexics with their issues? It seems that extensive study has not yet been done, but Boer does have evidence gathered by a grad student named Renske de Leeuw. The result of his study was that dyslexics made fewer mistakes when reading Dyslexie, as opposed to Arial. However, the font did not help with reading at a faster pace.

Other experts in the field do not seem to welcome Boer’s efforts, saying that dyslexia is a whole lot more than the “b” and the “d”. In spite of the fact that Boer was diagnosed with dyslexia as a kid, it seems that he needs a little more than his slightly altered font to help his case.

In any case, typophiles will certainly have something to say about Dyslexie, won’t they?

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You can read up on the whole process, but basically the idea is to blow up fonts to large point sizes, print and then cut them out of some kind of material (MDF, cork, plywood, etc.)

It’s great for showing off fonts in really big sizes, though, as with using old CDs for coasters, having holes underneath the glass or mug might not be a good thing.

Having said that, I think the at sign works really well, closely followed by the hash and the asterisk.

They’re definitely a bit sexier (can we use that word in relation to drinks coasters? Too late, I have) than the RSS coasters, cool though they are. The mousepad coasters don’t even come close.

Enter Fontplore, an interactive application built on a widget-aware table that can be used to search font databases quickly and intuitively.

Moving “navigation” and “action” objects around the table cause things to happen, such as scrolling through, previewing, printing or saving fonts.

Each object has a LED built in which changes color depending on its state.

The whole system is based on the reacTIVision system built by students and staff from Potsdam University, German, and makes use of a lot of open source stuff including MySQL Server, Mathematik, TUIO and PrintPDF.

Visit the web site for a lot more detail.

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Here we have origami-styled logos for Firefox, Twitter, Apple, Digg, Basecamp, Flickr, GMail, IE (broken, love it), iTunes, Mint, RSS, Opera and Skype, designed by Paddy Donnelly.

They can be downloaded in a variety of formats. Jump on to see them all: