As fonts go, none is more hated than Comic Sans. Though favoured by teachers for its immediate clarity, its popularity among people who don’t understand just how hideous it is to behold has turned it into the style of word processor publishing that is the most ridiculed in the world.
But for creator Vincent Connare, Comic Sans is “the best thing I’ve ever done.”
Connare was an engineer working for Microsoft when he designed the typeface, though he actually started off as a fine arts student in New York. As a young student in the world’s cultural capita, Connare would stumble through the city, taking inspiration from the galleries and museums he visited, forming strong opinions about what made for good or bad scripts.
“If you didn’t notice them, I considered that bad. And if you did notice that was good because at least they made you stop and look,” he says.
After cutting his teeth as a bohemian artist, Connare wound up working for Bill Gates, with his role to devise a snappy typeface for a still developing programme named Microsoft Bob, which was a more user-friendly interface on Windows 95.
Taking cues from the lettering in DC’s Batman and Watchmen comic books, Connare presented his bosses with Comic Sans – which they immediately hated. But the designer stood up for his font, which saw it eventually become a standard inclusion on all Macs and PCs by 1996.
You can now watch the Comic Sans story, told my Vincent Connare himself, in the video below, which might offer a bold new take on one of the world’s most divisive typefaces:
