I remember being in elementary school, hating the fact that Comic Sans was ubiquitous on school materials. I don't think I knew the word patronizing quite yet, but that's certainly how I thought of the font. "Do adults think kids won't be interested in something if it's not written in a childish font?" I remember thinking. I hated Comic Sans with a passion.
Fast forward some years, and Comic Sans is on every meme imaginable. The font itself is a meme, representing the triviality and silliness of whatever is being written. I still hated comic sans.
Fast forward to last year, when I finally learned that Comic Sans has a purpose, and an incredibly important one. Comic Sans was invented to be easier for folks with Dyslexia to read and differentiate letters, because no two characters are the same when inverted. I was upset at myself for hating on it for so long, and upset that it wasn't more common knowledge that there was a very good accessibility reason for it to exist, beyond looking cartoony and silly.
It made me think of all the infomercial products that people would make fun of, calling the products "useless" without thinking of the people they would help. Not everyone needs a bowl that can't be spilled - but someone with Parkinson's Disorder very well might. Part of being respectful toward all people involves keeping in mind that while something may seem silly or useless to you, it may change someone else's life for the better.
Fast forward to now, when I'm designing a prototype website for my final Interface Design project. It's an educational site targeted toward elementary/middle school age kids, and because of this I realized I should probably use Comic Sans for maximum accessibility, so kids of all reading abilities can read the information with minimum frustration. And let me tell you, it feels incredibly strange!
Design Instinct Brain remembers every meme it's ever seen and tells me I'm designing the ugliest site in the entire world. Childhood Memory Brain tells me that kids will feel patronized in the same way that I did when seeing this font at their age. These parts of my brain may be correct - but I'm still using Comic Sans because it's the correct choice to make for the site I'm building. I have to make a compromise on aesthetics for accessibility, and that's the right thing to do.
I write this out now not to tout how great I am at designing with accessibility in mind. In fact, I write this now because I'm not so great at it yet, and I absolutely need to improve. I'm writing this in case some other designer doesn't know what I've only recently learned, and it helps someone else create with accessibility in mind. I hope to continue to grow and improve as a designer, and in order to do that I need to learn from my mistakes and move forward with them in mind.