Balsamiq is state of the art in creating mockups. I also use it to draw UML sketches. But, the font management is still a challenge.

By default Balsamiq uses Comic Sans MS on Windows. Although Balsamiq seems to be one of the rare places this ugly font is useful, it seems to me that Balsamiq deserves something better.

Today I did another research to replace the MS Comic Sans font in Balsamiq. I found some nice hand written fonts you can use for free, but none of them render in good quality to use them in Balsamiq’s png exports. In the end I found the purecaffeine.com bold font. It has a similar quality than Comic Sans MS. But, it looks better to me when I use a font size higher than 13pt that is Balsamiq’s default.

Hint: purecaffeine doesn’t support Umlauts. You may use the Note this font instead. It works well in 20pt size.

Following the idea of purecaffeine it would be cool if Peldi creates his own font and deliver it with the following releases. Another idea is to have global font options, to switch the size or between regular and bold .

BTW: If you are new to Balsamiq configuration “by hand” and want to do a font switch on your own: You can create a Balsamiq config file and set a different font name to use (see end of Alex’s post for details).