Crime, Rank Stupidity

Comic Sans: The Perfect Font For A Subpoena... If You're As Dumb As This Clerk

Welcome to Montgomery County, Texas -- the town(s) that fonts forgot.

By  
on

Bear with me on this: it’s entirely possible that Kim Davis — while an atrocious public servant with a retrograde worldview — is not the dumbest county clerk in these great United States. After all, she knew enough to turn “not doing her job” into a religious freedom crusade. There’s at least some kind of savvy there.

Not so much at this clerk’s office where in a curious turn they recommend drafting legal papers in Comic Sans.

Yes, that Comic Sans.

While most people have never bothered to turn off “Times New Roman” on their copy of Word 95, a lot of people still get really persnickety about their fonts. I once worked with a partner who hated serifs more than unfilled hours. Whether it was an inner design-fetish or the desire to micromanage one more aspect of my workflow, I’ll never know. One of ATL’s most read posts of the year so far was this article discussing the best fonts to use on résumés. The font you choose can say a lot about your personality, your professionalism, and your basic understanding of word processing software. And as we concluded in that post, Comic Sans is never the right answer.

Welcome to Montgomery County, Texas — the town(s) that fonts forgot. Everything about their web presence — and is a warmed-over Prodigy page really a presence? — is a design disaster:

Courier? Hey, maybe this is a whole retro-chic thing about typewriters forced upon us by nostalgic hipster clerks (“Clerksters”). And if that’s true then — like everything else hipsters do — it’s still f**king stupid.

But the real pièce de résistance is the model criminal subpoena that local lawyers can use!

Sponsored

You really haven’t lived until you’ve seen “duces tecum” scribbled like a fourth grader wrote it.

Actually, for all the flack Comic Sans gets for its juvenile appearance, the font was actually inspired by the lettering in The Dark Knight Returns and The Watchmen — both adult-oriented works of serial art about vigilantes brutally taking the law into their own hands. Perhaps the clerks just couldn’t resist the irony of crafting a document request in a criminal matter in the same lettering made famous by a violent psychopath who murdered his way out of a prison cell.

And if so, that’s also f**king stupid.

(The full form subpoena is available on the next page in case you, ya know, ever find yourself representing someone in Montgomery County and want to look like a jackass…)

Earlier: What Font Should You Use For Your Résumé? Apparently This Matters To People.

Sponsored

1 2Next »

Topics

, , , , , , ,