comScore
Tech Wednesday, March 6th 2013 at 12:40 pm

Vatican Uses Comic Sans and Papyrus, Holiest of All Fonts, in New Pope eBook

While the Vatican convenes to find a new pope, maybe they should also consider looking for a new graphic designer. Their new eBook about the recently retired pope titled Benedictus XVI is a 62-page photo essay of the former pope doing pope stuff with captions written in Comic Sans. There’s no better way to get the message out that you haven’t lost touch with the modern world than by writing that message in the most universally reviled font in existence.

Besides the Comic Sans captions, the book also features many pictures watermarked with copyright notices written in Papyrus, another font that designers love to hate, and the one I’d actually put ahead of Comic Sans as “Worst Font to Use for Anything Ever.”

As best as I can tell, the eBook doesn’t make use of Wingdings anywhere, but in the interest of time I only gave it a cursory read. I would feel bad about not spending more time reading through it, but considering it’s in Comic Sans, they clearly spent about as much time putting this together as I spent looking at it.

You can read the book on the Vatican’s website, which I was surprised to find not hosted on Angelfire.

(Benedictus XVI via Business Insider, image via Mariantonietta Continenza)

Relevant to your interests

Filed Under |
  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1674819454 Kim Bannister

    It looks like it was made by a 10 year old

  • http://twitter.com/merrypranxter merrypranxter

    I’m pretty sure the font on the cover is the Harry Potter font…. (“Yer a WIZARD, Benny…”

  • http://www.facebook.com/juliette.sterner Juliette Sterner

    the cover font is Charlemagne

  • Idlethoughts

    COMIC SAAANNNSSS!!!

  • http://chicagoboyz.net/ TMLutas

    It’s actually relatively easy to change the css in the display font so that it shows whatever font you like (at least when using Chrome). So if Comic Sans grates, it’s the work of a few seconds to remove it (about 20 in my case). It’s one line people. Change it and spend a little time on the substance instead. You might like it better.

  • http://twitter.com/veenglish Victoria English

    The message is more important than the font.

  • Anonymous

    I just asked my out-of-touch elderly father, “Why is Comic Sans so–” and he immediately interrupted with a declaration of hate for this font. I had no idea people hated it so much, let alone that someone who spends little or no time online would have the same reaction as the rest of us. Crazy!