Nick's Website

The default font should be comic sans

I think for applications which create documents (word, powerpoint etc.) the default font should be one that is obviously objectionable. I am proposing Comic Sans, the most widely hated font, but I am sure you can also think of several sufficiently awful candidates. So why should the default font be something clearly terrible?

People hate the default font no matter what

When I work with people who make a lot of PowerPoints, they often strongly dislike Calibri. To me Calibri looks totally normal, so I was surprised at its near universal hatred. However, when I talked to a group of people who used google docs they had no objection to Calibri, but they did strongly dislike Arial. I think the difference is that Calibri was the default in Microsoft Office, and Arial is the default in Google docs.

My theory is the following happens:

  1. A default font is selected in a commonly used program
  2. People who don't put a lot of effort into presentation just use the default
  3. As a result people who do put effort into presentation learn to associate the default font with a lack of effort
  4. People dislike the default font and change it.

Of course within this there is still the large group of people who don't care that much about presentation, and are doomed to be judged by those who have gone through the process of learning about style. I think the solution to this is to make the default font obviously objectionable. So everyone will change it to something else and this process will never begin.

Testing this claim

As of January 2024 the default office font has been changed to Aptos. If my theory is correct, in 5-10 years a lot of people will strongly dislike Aptos. It will probably take some time for people to upgrade and get used to this as the default. But after some time I think people will start disliking it.

Other applications of this

I noticed that most websites change their link color. However, there is no "standard" color to change it to, and the default link color has remained more or less the same. I also noticed that some people dislike the default shade of blue for links and want it changed. In order to correctly convey this I think the default think color should be something almost illegible. Maybe something like this. Ideally this is good enough that someone could believe it was selected in earnest, but bad enough that basically everyone will change it.

Old default WordPress themes

WordPress is the most popular tool for designing websites. I have noticed that people often will start to dislike the default theme (possibly to counteract this they change the default theme regularly). This is probably because low effort websites will just use the default. This leads to people disliking the default despite there being nothing wrong with it.

Windows movie maker effects

Windows movie maker is default video editors on windows. As a lot of low effort content is made with it. I think this has caused people to dislike the effects it produces. For example, its intro and credits look bad to me.

Other possible solutions

I don't really think that anyone will change the default to be intentionally bad. That would make their product seem obviously inferior to their competitors. Here are some more slightly more practical solutions.

Randomly select a font for the default

If there is like 100 possible default fonts and one is chosen at random, then it would be impossible to dislike the default.

Regularly change the default

This is what WordPress does, and their newer themes look good as a result of it. This lets their new users have something that looks nice for some time.