"Comic Sans used to be funny to designers, but it's been corrupted by 'The Man.'" So begins the Comic Spurs manifesto, a creation of the James H. Goldberg Deskwear Collection that aims to rehabilitate Comic Sans in the eyes of hipsters.
The gag of Comic Spurs is pretty brilliant. Many businesses trying to put forward bespoke, artisanal charm choose typefaces with spurs, giving a typeface the illusion of being hand-drawn. And what's another typeface that looks hand drawn? The reviled Comic Sans.
We've written about the work of the (fictional) James H. Goldberg before. Previously responsible for creating a wedding ring for designers, James H. Goldberg is a comedic design collective made up of Michael Kleinman and Declan Byrnes-Enoch that aims to skewer all of the most ludicrous modern design trends.
With Comics Spurs, the trend Kleinman and Byrnes-Enoch want to skewer is the lame typography of every artisinal coffee shop chalkboard or bespoke food court franchise. "It was intended as a joke about how fake everything seems now, with words like 'artisanal' and 'bespoke' thrown around like they mean nothing at all," Kleinman tells me. "Comic Spurs is the font for that fakeness."
You can download Comic Spurs to use on your own computer here.