Most designers hate it – one is even campaigning to have it banned – but this writer has always had a soft spot for the font's rounded edges and handwritten aesthetic

Typographers will cringe, but I've always had a soft spot for Comic Sans. It was the first font I ever used. I was aged seven and making mayhem at my dad's office. My exasperated father sat me at his computer, threw me a copy of the day's paper and said: "See if you can't do better." Cue my first 'broadsheet': a Xeroxed slip of A3 that chronicled imaginary boardroom bust-ups, and real-life photocopier meltdowns.

In traditional typographical terms, it was a disaster. My headline font? Comic Sans. My body-text typeface? Comic Sans. My byline? Again, Comic Sans. But given the circumstances, I think my decision was justified. Of the handful of fonts in the Windows 95 package, only Comic Sans – with its rounded edges and its handwritten aesthetic – seemed friendly and accessible to my seven-year-old self. There was something called Helvetica, but that was too bland. And I toyed with this sophisticated thing called Garamond, but eventually found it too formal. Comic Sans, though – that seemed about right.

Of course, in 2010 my choice seems horribly crude. As Holly Combs, one of the founders of the Ban Comic Sans movement, tells me from Indianapolis, "Using Comic Sans is like turning up to a black-tie event in a clown costume." Indeed, Comic Sans is now the bete noir of the design world, widely known as the font typographers love to hate. It's used, supposedly unthinkingly, by thousands of amateurs every day, sometimes in the most inappropriate of places – on gravestones, on commemorative benches, and even funeral invitations. The program in which Comic Sans first appeared – Microsoft Bob – was named as one of Time magazine's 50 worst inventions. And most terrible of all, according to one designer I spoke to, the spacing between each of the font's letters is uneven.

It's not all bad, though: recent weeks have heralded a mini resurgence for the font. This spring, a major American gallery – Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art – temporarily redesigned its website, replacing Helvetica with Comic Sans. And only last Tuesday, literary website McSweeney's published a strongly worded pseudo-first-person defence of the typeface. Concluding that a light breeze of change was sweeping through typographical discourse, I set about persuading the design establishment that Comic Sans deserves a reappraisal.

For most designers, however, the idea is laughable – not least because, in their eyes, Comic Sans is simply not a very pretty font. As Paul Barnes – who co-designed the very font you're reading – explains, "On a purely aesthetic level Comic Sans is not a particularly well-crafted letterform. It's based on lettering one might find in a comic book, but it has none of the fluidity you associate with the real thing." Julian Morey, a typographer who has worked with Vogue, the V&A and Giorgio Armani, agrees: "I don't like slagging off typefaces, but in aesthetic terms, there are much better handwritten fonts than Comic Sans." And he should know: Creative Review once challenged him to design a poster that made Comic Sans look beautiful – and his only solution was to render the font unrecognisable, concluding that: "You can't make your mark on Comic Sans. Comic Sans is Comic Sans. It's not very flexible."

Little wonder, though: the font was made in a hurry. Inspired by the lettering in the graphic novel Watchmen, Vincent Connare – then Microsoft's inhouse designer – created the font within three days back in 1994 to accompany the company's child-friendly Microsoft Bob. Only later was the font packaged with Microsoft Word, and it was a fateful decision: Ty's Beanie Babies soon used it as their brand font; I used it in my newspaper; and once Disney picked it up, Comic Sans was unstoppable. While trained typographers think it's an over-used, poorly designed eyesore, millions of Microsoft users quickly saw Comic Sans as the typographical equivalent of the emoticon – the easy communication of friendliness – and it's adorned pizza menus, misguided CVs, and passive-aggressive notes ever since.

For Combs, who heads the slightly tongue-in-cheek Ban Comic Sans movement with her husband Dave, every use is a misuse. "You see it in the most inappropriate places. I once read a leaflet about irritable bowel syndrome that had been written in Comic Sans. Now that's just wrong."

But I've always thought that Comic Sans has its place. The written word can seem aggressive unless it's displayed in an accessible way – and so by using Comic Sans, which connotes warmth and friendliness, lay designers aren't necessarily displaying a lack of imagination, but rather an awareness of graphic design's central goal: the easy and reliable communication of information. If you don't have an extensive font library, then Comic Sans might be your only choice. It doesn't display ignorance, just a lack of alternatives.

But when I speak to Connare, the father of Comic Sans, he doesn't completely agree. He admits he is irritated by some critics of the font, but not because he thinks it's always used effectively, or because it's great design. In fact, Connare takes the opposite view: "It's like they're comparing a kid's drawing to Picasso or the Sistine Chapel when they're not in the same category." And he's otherwise slightly lukewarm about his creation. "I'm proud of it," he told me from Dalton Maag, his London typography studio, "but only because it suited its purpose at the time. We were trying to make a product, and Comic Sans suited the product. But I'd agree that it's often misused. I saw it recently in a bank – and that's not a great use of the font."

And so it takes another typographer to mount a firmer defence of Comic Sans. American Corey Holms – who, like Morey, was challenged by Creative Review to make Comic Sans look beautiful – thinks that the font is still relevant outside Microsoft Bob. "Comic Sans is not a 'beautiful' font, but there are appropriate uses for it," he tells me. "Most of the designers who mock Comic Sans don't seem to understand that the person using it is not necessarily displaying poor taste, but rather trying to communicate at a rudimentary level with the tools available to them. Comic Sans is proof positive that design works, the public gets it and understands that type means more than just words."

And perhaps Lacher, speaking for the Comic Sans typeface in the recent McSweeney's article, sums it up best: "You think I'm pedestrian and tacky? Guess what, Picasso. We don't all have 73 weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our 17in MacBook Pros."