Forget Comic Sans: Use these Fonts Instead

Poor old comic sans, it’s the typeface that many designers love to hate. The comic sans font was designed in 1994 for Microsoft by typographer Vincent Connare with the intention of providing a casual style typeface reminiscent of comic book lettering. The problem with comic sans appears to be its overuse and misuse.

This post is about looking at some cool fonts for use in a comic book or cartoon style on the web or in print. If you’ve been using comic sans to create a “comic” style in your designs, you’re missing out on tons of interesting typefaces that do the job so much better.

So here we go, as always, check each individual font for licensing terms, but these are all free for personal work and many for commercial use too.

Shock Corridor has a nice retro feel about it.

Valium (by Valium)

Amazagoda by AmazingMax

Mufferaw is part of a family of 14 fonts by Typodermic Fonts. The regular style is free to download here.

Looking very Dilbert-esque, the Dilbert font consists of all uppercase letters.

The lovely Single Sleeve by Vic Fieger.

Indy Pimp by Teabeer Studios (they have quite a few comic book style fonts on their site, so it’s well worth checking out)

Suplexementary Comic is pretty close to the original comic sans but still has a marker-drawn quality about it.

What do you think of these fonts? Any that you particularly like or would use in a design project?