CNC Comic Sans

I grew to absolutely despise the typeface Comic Sans back in the mid-to-late 90s because of CAD. I didn't realize anyone disliked it for aesthetic reasons for many years.

I had a job where I had to import customer artwork, from Illustrator, into a CAD/CAM system ("MasterCAM"). There was a utility that converted bezier curves to arcs & line segments because that's all the CAD system could deal with. The utility tended to made a mess, which I had to clean up by hand in the CAD system. It had to be clean geometry so I could run tool paths around everything, to drive the milling machine, to cut brass stamps out of the artwork. The brass stamps were for hot-foil stamping in these awesome power presses that dated back (mostly) to the 30s and 40s.

(The theory was that this CNC milling system was a cheap in-house alternative to sending stamps out to be made with the traditional EDM / photographic process. I doubt it was actually worth it. I wasn't involved in the decision to buy it.)

Comic Sans was not very cooperative to this bezier -> arcs translation, and I spent many an hour tweaking the little area where the horizontal lines go through the vertical stems and leave a little bump on the other side. That little bump never came through cleanly attached to the rest of the letter.

Little fucking bumps.

All that time for a barely visible detail that the customer probably wasn't even aware of.

So fast forward almost a decade - when I started seeing anti-Comic Sans rants all over the web, I thought: "Hell Yeah!", then realized they couldn't possibly hate it for the reasons I did.

My enemy's enemy is my friend I suppose. Even in type.

Unrelated to Comic Sans, but related to that CAD/CAM job - I was allowed to use the machine for my own artwork at one point and made a few nice pieces.

More brass pieces.