This is an insult to Comic Sans

I was JUST thinking about how I see this on a bunch of ai slop and slop adjacent stuff recently!

Yes! It feels like every second restaurant in my area has suddenly gone with this font and AI slop images for their menus. Lets call it Tragic Sans or something like that.

I see that, I go elsewhere.

It's weird be cause you would think that whoever makes these should have the common sense to see if it's a bit too obvious or too typical. You can use just about any font in existence in AI by just telling it to use that font, but lazy ass people choose the crypto chud font.

At least comic sans is easy on the eyes. easy to read.

What I come to call the "300" typeface because it's what all AI slop posters are like now. They're more or less based on "Edo SZ" which has seen very frequent use.

It isn't really a specific font, just something AI models made to generate images have picked up on. Things that were immediately attention grabbing and bold probably got more positive scoring and reinforcement during training, so they learned to use larger more dramatic styles (this is also why you often see sort of electric or fiery glows, sparks, dramatic lighting, etc) but that doesn't really work to help a business stand out when all of them now look like that.

I'm also not sure if everyone knows this yet, but most AI image generators nowadays are split into two parts. It used to be that you'd need a prompt like poster, graphic, promotional, large text, dramatic, brushstroke font, on sign, city background, club background, microphone, This Font is the New Comic Sans bold text, high quality, but since most people do this shit through something like ChatGPT, and might just say "make me a poster that says 'This Font is the New Comic Sans'", in the background, an LLM takes that prompt and makes a more extended prompt for the image generator.

This is where a lot of this type of thing probably takes place. For example, I prompted an AI model with Convert this prompt: "Make me a poster for my nightclub" into a Stable Diffusion prompt for a poster, and it gave me: nightclub event poster, bold neon typography, vibrant magenta and electric blue lighting, silhouetted dancers in motion, smoke and laser beams, glowing geometric shapes, dark moody background, high contrast, synthwave aesthetic, centered composition, space reserved for event title and date, ultra detailed, sharp focus, professional graphic design, 8k (emphasis added by me)

Nightclub posters do sometimes have these elements, but a lot of them actually use clean typography, little to no neon inside the typography, it just made up synthwave as a relevant aesthetic to the club it knows nothing about, and simultaneously wants a dark and moody background... with something that has high contrast, neon lights, lasers, and lighting everywhere.

Both image generators and LLMs optimize for things that are bold and for excessive additions like you saw in the prompt earlier, which leads to the super sloppy, over the top, crowded designs you see on most AI posters.

Sloppy drip 2

I personally didn't think Comic Sans was bad, just overused, especially in contexts where it didn't belong. (Funeral homes should have been banned from using it by industry regulation. They never did that. Anywhere in the world. This is why we need multinational legislation.)

This font, whatever the hell it is called, besmirches the good name of hand lettered sign painting and advertising that was common in advertising before computer typography. Have you seen old hand lettered ads? Unless they were in great hurry, they never left brush edges visible to this extent. It looked sloppy.

This fucking shite

Octoberfest this year had a lot of stands, all with the same AI slop posters. I bought a burger from a stand with just a handwritten sign. Felt good.

but I really hope it goes the way of Comic Sans

I use comic sans monospace in my terminal. But I don't want this shit in my terminal!

Slop font is way worse than Comic Sans.

This ! This is the exception for the rule : never slop

Is it really hard to write a prompt to make it not look like this? Or are people too lazy and just use the first generic slop result that they get?

Wrong. This is MUCH worse than comic sans.

New Lobster