Comic Sans is now the default reading font

Edit: Disregard this post. This did not work, for technical reasons. Rolling it all back.

Before I get into the details of this announcement:

Logged in users will still have Serif as the default for now, but you can change to comic sans in /settings/misc.

It's impossible to please everyone.

When I started this site a few years ago, the basic idea was simple: If Medium, a huge startup valued in the hundreds of millions, can't even offer syntax highlighting in articles, there's a lot of room for improvement in this space.

There is immense value in shared community, automatic distribution to followers, and a consistent reading experience, hence Medium's success; but if Medium is the best we can do, we were in trouble.

Originally, the design concept was: Make it look like Medium, but offer syntax highlighting—then figure stuff out from there. That's why I chose a serif font as the dev.to default.

Over time, as our platform and community have grown (now serving millions of visitors every month), we had a lot of demand for configuration such as night mode and sans serif fonts, which we recently delivered on:

New Feature: Personal Configuration (sans serif fonts/night mode beta)

Ben Halpern for The DEV Team ・ Mar 15 '19

#meta #changelog #webdev

Users can now adjust their reading experience based on their preferences, but there was still the issue of determining what the most sensible default should be for the site's reading font. Serif is typically better for reading sentences and paragraphs, Sans serif is typically better for skimming, and there is a ton of personal preference variation baked in.

We made the courageous decision of choosing a default nobody specifically said not to choose: Comic Sans.

Comic Sans is "a casual, non-connecting script inspired by comic book lettering, intended for use in informal documents and children's materials."

What better to match the positive, playful nature of our site than this fabulous font developed in 1994.

By total coincidence, Stack Overflow has incorporated Comic Sans into their design today as well. The world must be coming around on the font.

Happy coding!

P.S.

I was pretty hard on Medium earlier. If you want to write about why you're leaving New York or exposing a geo-political dick pic scandal, it's proven to be the ideal platform. It's also great if you love random pay walls on content that used to be free. It has many other great qualities like invasive popups, but I don't need to get into everything now.