On Saturday night, Chicago Bulls star player Derrick Rose wore a black T-shirt adorned with the phrase “I Can’t Breathe” during warm-ups as a way of showing solidarity with the family of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who was choked to death on video by a New York City police officer on July 17, 2014. The message on the shirt references Garner’s last words. Soon, similar T-shirts were being worn by players all around the NBA, including LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and Deron Williams.

The story created a good deal of positive buzz in the New York Times and on ESPN, but pretty soon, critics started spouting off. But these critics weren’t objecting to the T-shirt’s message. They were objecting to the font.

With a few exceptions, the “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts–including the one worn by LeBron James–were overwhelmingly printed in Comic Sans.





Obviously, Comic Sans is a contentious font. I’ve written my fair share of articles poking fun at Comic Sans myself. But I think the criticism of the use of “Comic Sans” in the “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts to be wildly off-the-mark. Not only does Comic Sans work to great effect here; there isn’t a better font that could have been used for the message Rose was trying to put across.

Is Comic Sans really an appropriate font to convey something this important? A thousand times yes.

What makes typefaces so special is they lend printed words a character they otherwise might not have. What filters are to Instagram, typefaces are to prose: they emphasize different aspects of the content underneath. Take a picture of a tree in Instagram, and everyone intuitively understands that the mood of that picture changes depending on the filter. With X-Pro II, the tree looks dark and mysterious, like something out of a pagan fable; upload it with Toaster, though, and it looks like a cheery, sun-bleached Polaroid taken on a road-trip in the 1970s.

The same thing is true of typefaces, except typefaces are even more powerful than photo filters: they can impart authority, irony, silliness, or tragedy to even the most mundane sentences. “I Can’t Breathe” isn’t a mundane sentence. It’s a powerful and poignant rallying cry against the corruption, thuggery, and endemic racism of the modern American justice system. It hits you right in your solar plexus; to read the words are to feel in small part for yourself what Garner felt as a New York City police officer choked him to death for no reason at all. Is Comic Sans really an appropriate font to convey a sentence that is this important?

Yes. A thousand times yes.