It’s Comic Sans Day today. If not so widely mocked, this font would be favored for its legibility across all ages and abilities, according to my daughter Emily—an expert in graphic design.

My early knowledge of writing options consisted of printing or cursive. As I progressed through college my preference became printing, which though slower to produce than cursive, resulted in a far more legible output and appealed to my engineering sensibilities.

I kept on handwriting through my early career—relying on secretaries to do the typing. However, it wasn’t long before I went DIY by becoming an early adopter of computers—a Radio Shack TRS-80. Its word processing capabilities made it far easier to write—a huge breakthrough by enabling editing.

Eventually, after a lot of hunting and pecking, I upgraded to MS-DOS (Microsoft’s disk operating system) and invested in Maven Beacon Teaches Typing to gain the ‘touch’ of my keyboard.

Things got really interesting with the advent of graphical user interfaces and widely available True Type fonts. After some wild and wacky times making bad blends of too many fonts, I settled in on the Microsoft Word defaults of the classic (invented 1931) Times New Roman (serif—featuring tails and feet) for text and more modern (1982) Arial (sans serif) for headlines. A big issue then, but far less so now that “e” rules, was whether a document would be read in print or electronically (on screen).

Around these times, Stat-Ease shifted its training materials from transparencies for ‘overheads’ to Powerpoint for projection from a personal computer (PC). Unfortunately, projectors in those early days put out a very weak light. However, being well equipped with Stat-Ease software, I rose to the challenge by deploying an experiment design in-class to maximize screen readability via adjustments to fonts and other factors.

Nowadays, figuring that nearly all my writing will be read on screen, I go exclusively with the current Word default of Calibri—a font that being san serif provides a “small, but significant, advantage in response times” according to this study in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology.

It turns out that, not surprisingly, studies now show different fonts increase reading speed for different individuals.

Participants’ reading speeds (measured in words-per-minute (WPM)) increased by 35% when comparing fastest and slowest fonts without affecting reading comprehension.

_{Adobe scientists and others who authored “Towards Individuated Reading Experience”, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Volume 29, Issue 431, March 2022, Article No.: 38, pp 1–56}.

Therefore, I envision that, aided by developments in artificial intelligence, our devices will keep track of how fast we read and adapt the fonts accordingly. Watch out: Like it or not, you may be subjected to Comic Sans.

PS Calibri fared well overall on average in Adobe’s experiment so that remains my favored font.