Sincerity Machine: Comic Sans Typewriter Combines Retro With The Most Hated Font On Earth

Check out the ‘Sincerity Machine’. It’s the world’s first and only Comic Sans typewriter. The designer, Jesse England, calls it an art project, and font elitists call it a horror. (According to an earlier post by the Inquisitr, eight-year-old girls who want to write about ponies will love it.)

You can watch the video about the Comic Sans typewriter by its creator below.

England says that he was viewing a document that utilized a typewriter font, when it occurred to him that ‘typewriter font’ didn’t have to mean the same classic font we’ve always associated with the machines. With a little work, he could give a typewriter any font he chose.

He says that even though Comic Sans is widely hated and mocked, he thinks of it as a very sincere font and decided to use it for the machine. He used a laser engraving machine to etch the letters, and added new vinyl caps to the keys so a user can see what their letters will actually look like in Comic Sans.

England says that he is involved in an ongoing project to question how society creates, views, consumes, and stores media. Using an old 70’s-era typewriter he found discarded in the street and bringing it to life with modern media’s most despised font was a way to look at media creation.

He credits a 2009 Cat and Girl comic strip for the name he gave the typewriter.

Jesse England has published other media-related art projects on his site, covering art projects from the past eight years. One recent project involves photocopies of each page of an e-book, stapled together in paper form, which he refers to as an e-book backup.

He refers to the incident a few years ago in which Amazon deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984, storing his e-book backup on a shelf as a commentary on how easily modern media can be ripped from our storage devices and erased into nonexistence.

Other projects include learning to write by hand in different fonts and a retro iPhone case (which he explains, pointing out that modern cases look like cassette tapes and game controllers, but true retro, today, is the look of an original iPhone).

While some projects, like the e-book backup, are visually jarring, this new typewriter may have the biggest shock value yet. For media elitists, nothing could be more visually nails-on-a-chalkboard than a Comic Sans Typewriter.

Images: Jesse England