Take Cover

Today I noticed that the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport launched a campaign to inform the public that a) you’re required to have a medical insurance, and b) that they’re going to get you if you don’t. That’s all fine and dandy. There’s only one slight problem: the campaign uses comic fucking sans.

Just go to the official website, ikzoekdekking.nl, and witness the horror in the footer.

It’s a fucking disgrace that the Dutch government pays tax-money for anything that uses comic fucking sans. It’s not as if the Dutch government is three years old and this campaign is the equivalent of an invitation to a birthday party. (Hint: unless the invitation is actually made by a three-year-old who doesn’t know better, there isn’t any good excuse to use comic fucking sans.)

The website, however, does get bonus points for using web-fonts, but I’ll have to deduct several points for not caring how these look—bump the font-size for the navigation two pixels up and it looks a lot better—and for not checking if the site breaks if you use an ad-blocker—hint: don’t wrap images in an element with the classname “ad_block”. They might not show up.

As a bonus, I hacked together a GreaseMonkey User Script that not only plays the Comic Sans game, but also swaps it with a more palatable monospace-font:

comic_saaaaaaaaaannnnns.user.js

Update Version 1.1 of the script now comes with a slightly less obtrusive alert.