Honest question: Why? What does this even mean? What makes a font "awful"? Surely this is a matter of personal taste and/or collective fashions?
I guess I'm an outlier since it's become cool to be a font nerd, but I really do not give a shit about typefaces. Except for difficult-to-read cursive scripts, pretty much everything looks fine. I find it difficult to conceive of how so many people get so worked up over this stuff.
I think the reason the Internet hates it in general is mostly because of its use in inappropriate places (I even saw a picture of a funeral announcement that used it).
In a world where good/bad are exactly defined points on a single axis where the unit is readability (and where the relationship between kerning/letterfit and readability was similarly precisely defined) that might have been an objective argument.
You don't have to be a font nerd to see that comic sans is ugly. Just like you don't have to be a car guy to see that an Aztek is ugly or Crocs are ugly. Anyone with any level of aesthetic sensibility will see these things intuitively.
Unfortunately, most people do not have much if any aesthetic sensibility.
If most people do not have much if any aesthetic sensibility, then perhaps you do need to be a font nerd (or a car nerd, shoe nerd, etc) to see these things intuitively.
Honest question: Why? What does this even mean? What makes a font "awful"? Surely this is a matter of personal taste and/or collective fashions?
I guess I'm an outlier since it's become cool to be a font nerd, but I really do not give a shit about typefaces. Except for difficult-to-read cursive scripts, pretty much everything looks fine. I find it difficult to conceive of how so many people get so worked up over this stuff.