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Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Google AdSense in Comic Sans Font

Search Engine Roundtable shows off a screenshot of what looks like a Google experiment – of using the Comic Sans font in AdSense ads.

Among designers and people with taste in general, Comic Sans is often considered one of the worst fonts of all time (or at least, the worstly abused font). So much that there's a Ban Comic Sans initiative... which, as this latest case show, may be a futile attempt.

On the other hand, there are not that many fonts which are deployed across lots of systems, and web texts (Flash and images aside) need to be based on these pre-installed, highly-deployed fonts. More diverse fonts in turn may decrease AdSense blindness with users. Showing Comic Sans in ads without an option to disable it may also make some webmasters look for competing systems instead, though; but perhaps, as Barry Schwartz writes, this ad experiment allows webmasters to just pick their own preferred font, which would certainly be a pro when it comes to making the ad look more integrated.

[Thanks WebSonic.nl! Photo source CC-licensed by Barry Schwartz.]

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