Jacob Aron, reporter
(Image: CERN)
The Higgs results presented at CERN this week were met with applause and cheers from Geneva to Melbourne, but one group was less pleased: font devotees. That's because the slides of one of the two presenters, Fabiola Gianotti of the ATLAS experiment, bore text set in Comic Sans. The typeface mimics handwriting and is much maligned for its irreverence and overuse.
It isn't the first time Gianotti has used the font - her use of it during last year's Higgs update provoked a similar reaction. But was it the wrong choice for presenting ground-breaking physics? The science of Comic Sans offers mixed conclusions.
One study suggests that Comic Sans is easier to read and more attractive than other leading fonts such as Times New Roman and Arial, at least for 9 to 11-year-olds. Another suggests that using Comic Sans doesn't make you seem less professional or mature, finding no significant difference between readers' impressions of people using the font versus the more serious Calibri. That slightly contradicts the results of a third study which found Comic Sans is perceived as happy, cuddly, young and passive.
A more serious knock against Comic Sans is evidence that easier-to-read fonts don't stretch your brain enough, making it harder to recall what you have read later on. This research advises using more difficult fonts to convey complex information - but it seems unlikely that anyone is going to forget Wednesday's results just because they were written in Comic Sans.
In fact, there is now a petition to rename Comic Sans to Comic Cerns in honour of the Higgs discovery and Gianotti's typographical choices. It currently has just a few hundred supporters, but it seems that the creator of the font, Vincent Connare, is also in favour of the proposed new name.
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