Ugly fonts, unreadable fonts, bad fonts… they have terrorized us for far too long, infiltrating our homes via e-mail or IM. Some font typefaces are so offensive that the only solution is to remove them from your computer and hope that everyone will do it until every copy of them are completely destroyed. In this article I have collected 10 of the most hated fonts. From the start please understand that I’m not saying that these fonts are the worst possible fonts. I know that there are hundreds or thousands of other fonts which are more horrible than these but this is a list with the most popular fonts, not some underground, made-in-the-middle-of-the-night fonts.

Comic Sans is the most hated font ever. I think this is the only font who has a dedicated website against it. Despite the fact that a lot of people say that they hate everything related to this font, many of them don’t have an argument why. Maybe the association with the AOL Company or with all those unwanted emails with little hearts and fluffy bunnies that you constantly receive from a colleague and you have to pass it on to 10 other people to show them your love made all of us font-killers when it comes to Comic Sans.

This font is commonly used on girls IM profiles or chats. Often, this font is used with a pink background and some falling hearts while listening to Celine Dion. The strange thing on this font is that it’s not oriented neither right nor left. I mean…who writes like this? For the sake of the example, take a piece of paper and start writing; you’ll see that your text is slightly inclined in a direction.

This font is the psychotic brother of Bradley Hand Font. It’s like a combination between an emo and a gothic rocker on ecstasy. Probably this font is used by witches when they make curses. It’s like writing on a piece of wood with Rambo’s knife.

Like Bradley Hand, this font is also used in public IM profile or on mystic Hi5 accounts. Besides this, I think Papyrus is the most popular font among churches.  It’s called Papyrus because the author wanted it to be similar to hieroglyphs but the only resemblance is the word “papyrus”. As far as I know,  Egyptians used ducks, snakes, cats, hands, etc in their writing system.

Yet another handwriting font. For some reason people love the idea of making any writing look handwritten, blatantly disregarding the fact that the design shouldn’t have a personal feel. I’m always thinking who in the name of the Design-God thinks that a printed paper with this font is actually handwritten? Or worst, an email? For the sake of everything nice, if you want to use this type of font, trow away the computer and use a pen and a paper.

As someone said, “Courier always reminds me of sending a job to the printer and forgetting to include the fonts.”. This font was also used by U.S. State Department until 2004 so maybe this is a another reason why people hate it so much.

Gill Sans is the Helvetica of England. One of the abiding eccentricities of Gill Sans is that its range of weights appears darker and less evenly distributed than any comparable face (even Futura is better moderated in this respect). If you want to read an article about this font, click here.

This font is a failsafe for awards and certificates. It’s like calligraphy without all the effort. This is an overused ‘formal/fancy’ font people use when trying to give the air of class to their design.

I’m among the people who hate this font because I can’t stop seeing Algerian everywhere now.  Algerian font, with its caps-only curves and flares, is as unique as a tribal tattoo around a bicep. Why would you use Algerian font in a X-mas Lakers-Heat game commercial? Why is it on a Toyota Paseo in Mexico? How come it’s on a billboard in Harlem? These are questions that can only be answered by old copies of MS Word and people too lazy to go beyond ‘A’ of the font list.

This is the inventive person’s alternative to italicizing Times New Roman. Its a halfway mix of a script font (like Brushscript MT below) and a handwritten running writing. This font was abusively used in wedding and ballroom invitations.