Comic Sans was released by Microsoft in 1994, as a font that looked friendly and childlike but most importantly did not appear ‘techie’.

But the font does not enjoy crushing support. A few years ago there was an internet operation to have it banned, and there are forums where designers and typographers whinge about the fonts embarrassed weighting and haphazard kerning.

US researchers from Princeton University and Indiana University decided to analysis what effect ‘difficult to read’ fonts such as Comic Sans have on learning and preservation.

They recruited 28 volunteers to complete a task that involved remembering a set of features for three illusory characters.

One group received the list in 16-point Arial font, while the other two groups received lists printed using 12-point Comic Sans MS or 12-point Bodoni MT.

Connor Diemand-Yauman, lead author of the study published in the journal Cognition, says the outcome showed Comic sans has its advantages.

“The study in our paper found that in a very controlled laboratory setting we could pick up our subject’s memory of certain facts by having them read information that was written in a font that was a little more difficult to read,” he told ABC Radio National.

“Participants remembered the data significantly better if it was in a font that was harder to read. We were real excited by this finding.”

In the second part of their study, Mr. Diemand-Yauman and colleagues moved their experimentation into the classroom.

“For the second study all we did was take the reading material of students from six dissimilar classes, over 220 students, and we just changed the fonts to make it a little more difficult to read,” Mr. Diemand-Yauman said.

Students were randomly assigned to a disfluent group and given reading material in a hard-to-read font such as Comic Sans or Monotype Corsiva, or to a control set.

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