PIPER HILL'S WEBSITE!!!

Why I Use Comic Sans

First of all, Comic Sans is what my voice sounds like. So that is the main reason I use it here, as I'm trying to give you a sense of what I'm like.

Secondly: Comic Sans scoops up the origin of letter learning and reading out of the brains of a large swath of a generation. For those people, Comic Sans is probably going to be the easiest to read. Nothing can be accessible to everyone, but I believe Comic Sans is accessible to more people than other fonts.

For those who don’t know, many elementary school students (including me) learned to write print letters by tracing large, typed-out letters on a sheet of printer paper with a grid — not in Comic Sans, but a similar font. I'm not sure how many people this speaks to, but at least at our school, in later elementary school, many teachers would use Comic Sans to indicate a “small” or “fun” assignment, not to be fretted too much over. For serious papers and tests, it was all about Times New Roman. Even in High School, if a teacher wanted to signal that something was low stakes, they’d often use Comic Sans on the handout.

For me, it’s the kind of thing that automatically lowers my heart rate. And I hope it can do the same, at least for some people visiting this website. This is not to say I want to alienate or exclude people who did not grow up reading Comic Sans — it’s just not an objectively difficult font to read for people who didn’t. The only people I’d like to alienate are people who, after reading all of this, still think that Comic Sans is worthless. But my guess is that if that were you, you wouldn’t have even made it this far.

I’d rather be dismissed as juvenile than feel elitist or inaccessible. I also want to be myself on my website, because I would love to normalize the practice of not having to pretend to be "super serious" in order to convince people that we are capable of doing things.

I used to have a very "professional" website, but it made me seem like a jerk. That's not to say that all professional websites make people seem like jerks. Mine just did. The aesthetics of this whole website are very silly, because I am very silly. And I think that is an asset. We will see how it turns out. My jester's privilege may cost me jobs. If that seems to be happening maybe I will revert to something more streamlined and scary and less expressive, that has the express intention of impressing people.

While I wish I didn't have to try and impress you, depending on who you are, I might. And that puts us in a weird power dynamic where I cannot bring my whole self to the table. However, my hope is that bringing some of myself to this website models one sprout of self love and vulnerability that I hope we can all grow together. And if that is something that is important to you, maybe you feel like you'd want to work together. All font is performance, but you, lovely person, are my target audience, so I want to be real with you, whatever that means in the context of a website designed to advertise myself to "the world."

If you read all of that, you're a very epic champion. If you didn't, you're still a champion.