April 21, 2009, 8:27 am
Ban Comic Sans?
by Henry Woodbury
Filed under: Comics, Design
Comic Sans didn’t spring to life on its own from the primordial Windows ooze. Typographer Vincent Connare designed it:
…one afternoon, he opened a test version of a program called Microsoft Bob for children and new computer users. The welcome screen showed a cartoon dog named Rover speaking in a text bubble. The message appeared in the ever-so-sedate Times New Roman font.
Connare went to work on creating an appropriate comic font for Bob. Not long after a Microsoft product manager included his creation as a standard font in Windows and the spread of Comic Sans began. The spread of efforts opposed to it soon followed.
Connare retains a wry appreciation for his most famous work:
“If you love it, you don’t know much about typography,” Mr. Connare says. But, he adds, “if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”
Comments
No comments yet.